


Stranger Things Have Happened

by BleedingInk



Series: Hello Stranger [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Meg Masters-centric, Minor Character Death, Temporary Amnesia, Wheelchair User Meg, Wheelchairs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-04 08:56:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15837978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: After waking up with no memory of her past, Meg tries to adapt to the changes in her body and the world around her.[Updating every day]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diablo77](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diablo77/gifts).



> This started as a birthday present for mydear friend Gabe and a continuation of [this other fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15622728) and it sort of... mutated innto something much longer.
> 
> I'm gonna be posting a chapter every day for the next week until it's complete. Anyway, sorry for the delay, Gabe, and hope you enjoy it!

The nights were the worst part.

During the day, Meg was busy: there were nurses coming to check on her and ask her if she needed anything, bringing her food and pushing her wheelchair to different places of the hospital where a new doctor would examine another part of her and try to determine everything that was wrong with her.

"We usually don't see a case of retrograde amnesia like this," Dr. Wheeler would tell her students. "The patient only remembers her name, but it didn't come as consequence of a head trauma."

That was one of the first exams they had submitted her to: she had to lie down perfectly still inside the MRI scanner while the doctors took pictures of her brain. They had discovered things that were, according to them, "baffling".

"Seen like this, you have a perfectly normal brain," Dr. Trevor had told her. "What's more, you seem to show... more brain activity than you should. As if you were able to process information faster than most people."

"That is odd," Meg had said, feigning surprise. "I haven't noticed anything strange."

She was lying. She could hear the nurses’ chatter and steps outside of her room while they were still on the other side of the hallway, or the TV in the waiting room two floors beneath her, or a bird singing in a faraway tree outside of her window.

She didn't tell those things to the doctors. It was bad enough that the doctors already treated her like a medical curiosity because of what Dr. Wheeler had called "the strange circumstances of her arrival to the hospital".

Detective Smith showed up now and then to interrogate her about them and give them an update on how the investigation was going. It usually meant absolutely nothing.

"We're running your photograph through every missing person reports, going as far as five or six years ago," he'd explained to her. "We're looking into every Megan, Marjorie or Margaret around your age range. We're doing everything we can to find your family."

Meg nodded and thanked him. She really hoped that they would find someone soon, because as the days went by, she felt more and more like a lab rat.

It wasn't just her amnesia, though. Despite her brain and its unusual activity, she just couldn't get her legs to respond. They had ran tests and more tests, but they couldn't find any evidence of a spinal injury or a degenerative disease that caused her to not be able to walk. In the end, they had concluded it was psychological and dispatched her to the psych ward ran by Dr. Wheeler.

Meg wished she hadn't. The look some of Wheeler's students gave her made her extremely irritated. She almost wanted to punch them and ask them if they'd never seen a woman in a hospital gown and a wheelchair before.

"We can attempt some techniques to tap into your memory, but I must warn you, some of these are... controversial," Dr. Wheeler explained to her.

"I'm willing to try everything once, doc," Meg had replied, shrugging.

Her willingness to try hadn't been enough, though. No matter what he tried or for how long she tried it, none of Dr. Wheelers "techniques" aimed at hypnotizing her worked.

"That is strange," she said, frowning, after they failed for the fifth time. "Are you having any other sort of trouble, Meg? Sleeping, perhaps?"

"No, not at all," Meg lied. "I sleep like a baby."

That was another lie, and whoever she’d been in a past life, Meg was pretty sure that she had been good at lying.

The nights were certainly the worst, because as bad as the scientific curiosity of Dr. Wheeler and her peers was, at least it gave Meg something to distract herself. The truth was, she couldn't sleep at night. Several times, the night shift nurses had scolded her for keeping her light on far too late, reading magazines or books she had managed to sneak out of the day room. They usually took them away and told her to go to sleep and Meg tried, she really did. But no matter how much she tossed and turned or stared at the white wall until she could feel her exceptionally active brain melting inside out of boredom, she never slept a wink.

The strange thing was, she never felt tired. She never felt like she was losing touch with reality or like she needed to rest at any other time of the day. Wasn’t she supposed to be going insane by that point? She didn’t she was. She should be, but she was still in control of herself, enough to let it drop around Nurse Jackson that she had overheard her and Nurse Davis talking about stealing pills from patients.

Nurse Jackson had looked at her with pure horror in her eyes.

“How did you hear that? You were nowhere near us!” she exclaimed.

Meg thought that woman was definitely not tough enough to be some sort of criminal. If it had been her, she would have denied the accusation and threatened the person who wanted to expose them into silence.

The moment she thought, she pictured that the person she had been before couldn’t have been all that great.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to say anything,” Meg told her, smiling kindly. “Provided you do me a favor or two, that is.”

Life in the ward became so much more comfortable after that. Jackson provided her with magazines and cigarettes (after trying several brands, Meg decided that she liked menthols best) that she could trade for an extra desert or the privilege to watch whatever she wanted in the TV room for another hour with the other patients. Most of them were too scared to refuse her and of course, no one would have bothered with trying to tell on her to Dr. Wheeler.

It was a small quota of power, petty, even, but Meg felt more comfortable having it than not.

The strange men in the cheap suit came to her a week after she had established her domain. She was in the yard and had parked her chair right underneath the cool shadow of the only good tree there. She heard them coming from far away enough that she had time to turn off her cigarette (she was almost done with it anyway) and let the butt fall to ground.

“Meg Doe?” one of them asked her.

“In the flesh,” she said, turning her wheelchair around and flashing them her biggest smile. “What can I do for you?”

The men took out badges and flashed them quickly in front of her eyes.

“I’m Agent Kent, this is my partner Agent Olson,” he said. “We have a couple of questions for you about your, uh… sudden appearance.”

Meg slowly tilted her head at them. There was something that was definitely not quite right with this picture and she couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it was best if she played her hand carefully.

“Well, you should talk to Detective Smith, then. He is the one handling my case and trying to track down my family.”

“We have talked to him,” Agent Olson said. “But we would like to hear what you have to say.”

Meg arched an eyebrow.

“What agency did you say you belonged to, again?”

“FBI.”

“And why would the FBI be interested in a case like mine?”

“Well… for all we know, you could have been taken by… some really bad people,” Agent Kent explained. “And we’d be very interested in finding them.”

The beating of the hearts of the “agents” changed, ever so slightly, but noticeable to her sensitive ears.

_Liars._

Meg analyzed her options. It wasn’t the first time a fake agent or police showed up to interrogate her. The first one had been the so-called “Detective Masters”, who had come right after she had been taken to the hospital. Detective Smith and his partner had declared that he must have been a journalist looking for an exclusive, but in the days that followed, nothing had come up in the local newspapers that reported her amnesia and how the police were looking for information about her. Meg was left to conclude the guy was most likely a sleazy blog writer of some kind.

He hadn’t looked like it though. He had sounded sincere and patient when asking her questions and his blue eyes…

She turned her attention back to the fake FBI agents. Thinking about “Detective Masters” had made him sad for reasons she couldn’t understand, and she no longer fell like playing them with them.

“Oh, I bet you would,” she told, with a smile so wide it was almost a snarl. “I bet you’d like to know exactly what kind of aliens kidnapped me and did experiments with my head, don’t you?”

“No, that’s not…”

“Wait, perhaps you think I’m Bigfoot’s bride and this–” she gestured towards her wheelchair “– it’s because he fuck me so hard, right?”

“We didn’t…”

“Get the fuck out of here before I call the actual police and they arrest you for impersonating an officer of the law and harassing a disabled hospital patient!” she shouted at them.

She clumsily turned her chair towards them, but they ran away before she could run one of them over. She still rolled after them, silently to make sure they got out of the ward. The nurses that saw them sprinting past them stared with eyes wide open, unable to react until Meg halted her chair and gave them all the stink eye.

“You need to double check those damn badges, Jackie,” she told them.

She was about to turn around and go back to her peaceful spot in the yard when she caught someone else out of the corner of her eye.

He was standing with his back against the wall, inconspicuous, as if he was another person waiting to visit a family member or a friend that had been admitted to the ward. He was wearing the same trench coat and blue tie as the last time she’d see it and he looked just as startled as everyone else by the faux agents running through the doors.

“You!” she exclaimed.

As if her voice had brought him back from wherever he was, he took a step forwards and looked directly at her.

Unlike them, he didn’t start running when Meg rolled up to him.

“What are you doing here again? Trying to get another little exclusive? Trying to make a fool of me again?”

She lost control of the chair and she almost would’ve crashed him if he hadn’t leaned over just in time to stop her.

Meg’s fury was immediately assuage when his blue eyes met hers.

She could guess what everyone around her was thinking with frightening ease. She could tell when they were lying to her or what they wanted and she could easily manipulate them into doing what she wanted. Whoever she had been, whatever she had been, obviously she had no problem reading people.

But when she met those eyes, she knew immediately this guy was different. The guy couldn’t be older than thirty, forty at the most, but his eyes were those of someone much older, someone who had seen untold infinities. He hunched his shoulders as if there was something heavy on them, and the way his lips parted when he looked at her, as if he was sucking in a breath, as if he couldn’t quite find the words to talk to her…

He let go of her chair and straightened up.

“I’m sorry,” he said with a deep, gruff voice. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have come here.”

He turned around and headed for the door. Walking briskly, but not fleeing like the other two guys had done.

Meg’s own hard was beating so hard she could heart it in her ears.

“Wait,” she muttered and then a little louder as he kept walking away: “Wait!”

“Meg, hold on! You can’t…” someone called behind her and to her luck, it was Nurse Jackson. One glare was enough to stop her in her tracks, so Meg could go after the mysterious “Detective Masters” all the way out to the hospital’s front door.

“Wait up!” she repeated.

This time it worked. He stopped, hesitating for a moment with a foot in front of the other, as if he still wanted to run away from her. Meg quickly rolled up to him and moved so her chair would be blocking his way.

She didn’t want him to get away until she’d had a word with him.

Except now that she was actually looking at him again, now that his eyes were on her face again, it took her a second or two to find whatever words she wanted to say to him.

“Why _did_ you come?” she asked in end. If he knew she had discovered he was a fraud and he knew she’d be mad at him, why risking it?

He fidgeted with the cuff of his trench coat, almost as if he didn’t dare to look up at her again.

“I… I wanted to know how you were doing.”

She couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. That should have made her uneasy. It meant that this man, whoever he was, wasn’t someone he could control or manipulate as easily as every other human around them.

She also didn’t know why she had just thought about the two of them as separate entities from the rest of the world, but there it was.

“Well, then. Why don’t you come inside and I give you the long answer?”

Rolling in a straight line wasn’t a problem, but Meg wished her turning over was a little smoother. She had time to see him coming up closer to her and pushing the wheelchair for her so she could rest her arms. Not that they were tired to begin with, but she appreciated the gesture.

She told Jackson that he was a visitor and not to disturb them and then she guided him to the yard and back at her spot underneath the tree.

“I prefer being outside,” she told him. “It’s getting cooler these days and I’m always hot for some reason. Besides, you know, the obvious reason.”

She smirked at him, but he didn’t seem to get the joke. He only stared blankly at her.

“… oh,” he muttered in the end when it became obvious that she was expecting some sort of response.

She sighed and took out the pack of cigarettes and lighter she kept hidden right underneath her ass. It probably wasn’t the most hygienic place, but none of the nurses were ever going to examine her wheelchair if she did that, were they?

“Are you supposed to be doing that?” he asked her while she breathed in the smoke.

“No, not really,” she admitted calmly.

He wisely chose not to question her about it. He sat on the stone bench next to her, his back rigid and his hands gently placed over his thighs, but it was a relief. It would be easier to talk to him face to face like that.

“So how about a ping pong?” she suggested. “You ask a question and then I get to ask another. Sounds fair?”

He kept looking at her with his hands in his pocket. His eyebrows were tightly knit, as if he was thinking very hard about something he couldn’t quite figure out. Meg shifted nervously, but in the end, he nodded.

“Yes. Sounds fair,” he accepted. “You go first.”

Meg toyed with her cigarette.

“What’s your name?”

He hesitated for a fraction of a second, but it was enough for her to realize that his answer was bullshit:

“Clarence Masters.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I believe it’s my turn now,” he said before she could say something else.

Meg blew out a smoke ring at him, frustrated.

“Fine. Ask away.”

“How do they treat you here?” he asked. “Are you doing okay?”

“Those are technically two questions,” she pointed out with a smile. Despite all the things she found strange about him, she found she was actually enjoying their banter for some reason. “They treat me well. I make sure of that.”

Clarence nodded and said nothing. If he was expecting an answer to his second question, Meg was just going to leave him hanging for the moment.

The wheels in her brain were turning and she was suddenly devising a way so Dr. Wheeler didn’t have the chance to treat her like her little social experiment anymore.

“Why do you care?”

He looked down at his shoes for a moment.

“I… I can’t tell you that.”

Meg took another pensive drag.

“You’re not really a detective _or_ a journalist.” It wasn’t a question, so it didn’t count.

“No,” he admitted.

“The only reason I can think of for you to be here and asking all of these questions is because you’re someone who has a personal investment in my well-being,” she stated. “And the only reason you’ve had for that is because you either knew me or I’m just a very, very interesting case study for you.”

He didn’t reply and nothing in his face gave away what he was thinking about Meg’s assessment. After a few moments of his eyes boring into hers, Meg looked away. The guy really needed to stop being just so… intense.

“I don’t want you to… get upset,” he muttered in the end. “That’s why I can’t tell you.”

So he _did_ know her. And he was really bad at bluffing if Meg had managed to get to the core of the issue in such a short moment.

“Would you… would you rather know?” he asked her in turn.

“I’m bribing Nurse Jackson,” Meg said. “I lie to my doctors all the time. And you want to know what the fun part is?” She slowly turned her gaze back at him. “I don’t feel guilty for any of it. I think I could do even worse things if someone bothered me enough.”

Clarence nodded again. He didn’t seem shocked at all by that confession on her part.

“So maybe you’re right,” she continued. “Maybe if I were to discover who I was before, it would be upsetting because, just between you and me, I think I might have been a bad person.”

“You were someone…” he started, but then he stopped himself before he could add anything else. Meg took that as a sign that she had hit the nail in the head.

“But maybe this whole amnesia thing is a… what would they call it? A blessing in disguise,” she said. “Maybe I finally have the chance to be someone else, you know?”

“If that is what you want to be. You have that freedom, Meg.”

“Well, I’m not exactly stretching my wings and flying high in this ward with Dr. Wheeler trying to turn me into her pet hamster,” she pointed out, with an eye roll. “Which brings me to my next question.”

He startled, as if he had forgotten about the game they were playing.

“Which is…?”

“Can you get me the hell out of here?”


	2. Chapter 2

Clarence disappeared, without any comment of when he was going to return or if he would return at all.

Meg supposed she should be worried. As far as she was concerned, he was a complete stranger and she had no reason whatsoever to believe a single word he had said. He could have been more or less lying through his teeth and she’d be none the wiser. But for reasons that she couldn’t explain, even to herself, she believed him. She believed he had told the truth when he’d said he’d “see what he could do” to get Meg out of the ward.

So all she had left to do was wait for him to return or, in the meantime, start planning some other kind of escape.

Dr. Wheeler wasn’t going to help with that, that much was clear.

“I understand your concerns, Meg, I really do,” she said when Meg brought up the possibility of leaving the ward. “But as long as the investigation about your identity is still in place, the best place for you to be is right here. We still don’t know who you are and you’re still getting used to the state of your body.”

Meg tapped her knee with her fingers, pensively.

“I could find a way to get an ID and a social security number and all those things necessary to be part of society, right?” she speculated. “They could probably make an exception in my case.”

Dr. Wheeler observed her over her glasses. Suddenly, her dark eyes had turned excessively cold and Meg could tell that she was very angry.

“I’m sure,” she said, her lips curving in a tense smile. “But that would take time and you need somewhere to stay in the meantime.”

“Well, I could…”

“Need I remind you, Meg, that I am running with all the expenses of you being in my ward?” Dr. Wheeler asked. Her tone had become tenser, as if she was barely containing herself not to scream at Meg. “I’ve had to fight against the board to allow you to stay here. They think we should have left you go to some sort of shelter for homeless people and let you handle everything by yourself.”

That was a lie, it was easy to tell. What Meg couldn’t figure out was why Dr. Wheeler was telling her that. Was she on some sort of weird power trip by keeping Meg in there? Was Meg’s assessment that she was a scientific curiosity for her and she would not allow Meg to leave until she had picked apart her mind and found the reason not everything about her was the way it was supposed to be?

But when Meg looked at her again, she realized it didn’t matter. Dr. Wheeler wasn’t a threat. She was just a woman who was too certain of her own importance. There was nothing that she could do if Meg decided not to cooperate with her anymore.

She smiled back at her and straightened her shoulders. It was hard to look menacing from a wheelchair, but she was going to try to anyway.

“And I appreciate that,” she said, in the most passive-aggressive tone she could muster. She reached for a pen that was on top of the desk and slowly balanced it between her fingers. "But you see, here's the thing, doc..."

She stabbed the pen as hard as she could into the desk. Dr. Wheeler screamed and leaned backwards, and even Meg was a little surprised at how deep she managed to thrust the pen into the wood. She showed none of it on her face as she raised her chain and smiled at Wheeler.

"I'm gonna follow your little game a bit longer just because you've piqued my curiosity as to what exactly you're trying to accomplish here," she said. "But when I get tired and I decide I want to go... you're gonna let me go without making too much of a fuzz. Are we clear?"

Wheeler kept staring at her, her eyes wide open with shock. She swallow, but in the end, she nodded slightly.

"Good." Meg rolled her chair away from the desk and turned around. She was really getting the hang of it lately. "Great talk."

That night, she started wondering if it had been a good idea to threaten Dr. Wheeler.

Not because she didn't deserve it, what with her belief that Meg should be thankful and stay there and let her do whatever experiments she wanted with her. But because now that Wheeler had seen what Meg was capable of doing, she might get it into her stupid head that she needed to watch Meg closer.

Meg sighed and leaned back on her bed. That was the kind of thought that always occurred to her. The disadvantages of having a hyperactive brain that didn't need to sleep. She could be thinking about something more entertaining, like what kind of beer she was going to drink once she got out of there. She had tried to convince Jackson to bring her some booze, but the coward had told her it was simply impossible. Meg was convinced that when there was a will, there was way and Jackson was just making excuses, but perhaps it was best to keep her head down...

The nightly sounds in the ward changed.

Meg sat up slowly. She could hear the other patient’s snores and deep breathing, calm and in some cases, heavily sedated. She could hear a cricket chirping insistently on the yard, and the far away flapping of night bird's wings.

But suddenly, she couldn't hear the sound of canned laughter in the receptionist's desk anymore. Today was... what, Wednesday night? It was Lars shift. Lars was a large, unambitious man, who preferred to watch old sitcoms in his phone rather than actually make sure that no one came into the ward or that the patients weren't escaping it. They had hired him as a watchman because of his sheer size, not because he was especially brilliant or especially fast. On some nights, Meg had rolled down the hallway to join him in his nightly TV marathons and bought his silence with some cigarettes and a flan she'd stolen from dinner.

She couldn't hear Lars wheezes (the man really needed to lose some weight) or his phone reproducing his series. Just sudden, unexplained silence coming from that part of the ward.

Then came the footsteps.

"Are you sure that is the room?"

"Yes. Now, get your shotgun ready. We still don't know exactly what she is."

There were talking in whispers, but Meg heard them loud and clear as if she was hearing them from afar, and she recognized their voices. They were "Agents" Olson and Kent.

And they were coming for her.

Time slowed down. Meg took a deep breath as she evaluated her options. She could scream, but she doubted anyone would hear her. They had probably done something to Lars, whether it was sedating him or convincing him to leave his desk somehow and the nightshift nurses had probably suffered the same fate. No one would hear her.

And dammit, her chair was folded and leaned over the opposite wall from her bed, entirely out of her reach. Who had been the idiot that had left it over there? Didn't they think she could possibly need to get up for something in the middle of the night?

"What if Wheeler is wrong?" Olson asked. His voice was looming closer now. "What if she isn't something, but it's just... a girl with incredible bad luck?"

"You saw the results," his partner answered. "You saw what she did to Wheeler's desk. She's definitely something."

"I mean, yes, but this is so odd. What is her end goal here? Why check in one this hospital? Why stay in it? What if she really doesn't remember any of it?"

Kent stopped and sighed deeply. Apparently he was done with his partner's stupidity.

"Look, whatever it is, it can't be good. So we slash first and ask questions later. And you heard Wheeler: we better do it now while she's still helpless."

Meg tried to calm her panicking heart and looked for something (anything!) that could serve as a weapon. She had nothing, except for her own hands.

Fine, if it came to that, she'd fight with them. But she was not about to let these random guys walk in on her unexpectedly.

They were outside the door. Meg fixed her eyes on it, hearing as the fumbled with the doorknob, willing to stop it from opening...

"What the...?" Kent whispered.

The doorknob turned more furiously, but as much force as he applied to it, it wouldn't budge.

Meg was just as surprised as her assailants. She focused on it harder and will it to get them to go away, to stall them, to burn them...

Kent let out a whimper of pain and Meg realized, all of the sudden, that she could make things move with her mind.

It didn't feel like a power brewing inside of her or anything. It didn't hurt and it wasn't difficult. It was just as natural as stretching her hand to grab something, as easy as moving her eyes through the darkness and focusing them on the wheelchair.

It shook and clattered, but didn't move from its spot. Meg cursed under her breath and willed it to move harder. It had to come. It was her only chance to have some sort of movement range, to face whatever these guys were trying to do to her. She couldn't just...

It only took that one moment of distraction to forget that she was also supposed to keep the doorknob closed.

The kick echoed down the hall and the door swung open violently, so clearly these guys had abandoned any semblance of discretion. They barged in with their shotguns up.

Meg rolled over herself and fell from the bed as the first shot rang above her, where her had ben a second later. She crawled to the wall and instinctively held her hands up in a pushing motion: the bed slid through the floor, knocking Kent and Olson on their asses with a shout.

They were making a ruckus. Why was no one coming to check on them?!

It didn't matter. She had discovered how to use this new power of her and now she was ready.

Kent and Olsen stood up, holding their shotguns up and pointing them directly at her. From her corner on the floor, Meg moved her hands apart. The second shot that Kent blew went straight to the ceiling while Olson's shotgun fell to the ground with a clatter while he flew over the room and got pinned to the wall by her invisible force. His face grew red and Meg found herself laughing, laughing like a maniac.

She wasn't helpless. She could fight them.

She turned her face to Kent, who had hit the opposite wall and fallen to the ground. His shotgun wasn't within reaching distance and there was a cut in his forehead gushing blood, but he still managed to look at her with pure rage in his eyes.

"Stay right where you are!" Meg threatened. "Or you're not going to like what happens to your friend!"

She closed her fist ever so slowly. Olson let out a choking gasp and kicked his feet uselessly above the ground.

"You bitch! Let him go!" Kent demanded.

He wasn't too brilliant. If he had been, he would have seen the fact that they weren't both death at that moment indicated that she had no interest in killing them. She would've politely - well, not so much - asked them to leave her alone and never come back and maybe what the hell did Wheeler know and was holding back from her.

But Kent was an idiot.

He scrambled to his feet and jumped at her with a growl. His own impulse, plus the little push she gave him where enough to make him fly above her head.

The window shattered when his body collapsed against it. Meg had the strange thought, as she heard him screaming in fear all the way down, that the hospital should probably put bars on those windows.

Olson had fallen to the ground and was coughing violently.

"Walt..." he said with a strangled voice as Meg crawled through the broken glass towards him. "You killed Walt... bitch..."

"Yeah." Meg grabbed him by the hair. "And you need to shut the fuck up."

The cracked of his nose bone when she crashed his face against the floor was... satisfying, in a way. Meg grabbed her chair and propped herself up in it. Small shards of glass had sunk in her knees and the palms of her hands. She pulled them out and watched with only mild curiosity as the blood stopped flowing and the skin closed over her scrapes.

After everything she had done, fast healing honestly didn't look that far-fetched.

She looked down and realized that Walt was still breathing. She was wondering if she should finish the job (he was going to come after her again, for killing his partner, she was sure) but then, finally, the hospital staff caught on to what was going on.

Lars stumbled into the room clumsily, holding up his Taser and looking around at the general destruction with eyes that almost popped out of their sockets. Meg decided it was best to play the victim.

"Oh, thank God!" she exclaimed, making her voice sound trembling and broken. "Lars, I think these guys were trying to kill me!"

 

* * *

 

Convincing Lars to take all the credit for the mess wasn't hard. After all, he shouldn't have left his desk in the first place and he should've noticed the two suspicious guys wandering on the halls. Lars, obviously, suspected that Meg had been able to defend herself perfectly fine and the way he looked at her (out of the corner of his eye, with a reverent fear that Meg found quite flattering) indicated that he wanted her nowhere near him anymore.

That was a shame. Late night sitcoms were a good way to pass the time in her constantly insomniac state.

But Meg really didn't have a lot of time to regret that. She was too busy pretending to be a nervous wreck, crying and sobbing in front of Detective Smith, telling him she had been so scared and she had just no idea who these men were and what they wanted with her.

"I just... I don't know. They came into my room with their guns and I screamed, so Lars came running and they fought... it was all so confusing..."

"It's okay, Meg," Detective Smith told her, patting her hand softly. "Don't worry. We're going to get to the bottom of this."

Meg gave him a teary smile, but the moment he looked away, she raised her eyes and fixed them straight on Dr. Wheeler.

The woman seemed to have shrunk an inch or two. She was staring at Meg with pure terror in her face, with her back against the wall and her arms tightly wrapped around herself, as if she was physically trying to stay as far away from Meg as she could. She missed Detective Smith's question and had to ask him to repeat it because she was so distracted by Meg.

"Uh... no... I didn't know them. I don't know how they got into the hospital," she said. "I'm sorry, this is all... all very upsetting."

Detective Smith finished writing something down in his notepad and nodded.

"The man we took into custody isn't speaking at the moment," he informed them. "And his partner, the one who... uh, took a plunge, has been identified as Walt Keller. He's a petty criminal who was wanted for theft, authority impersonations and a series of more, uh... colorful crimes around several states."

"Colorful crimes?" Meg repeated.

"Grave desecration."

"Oh, goodness."

Meg put a hand against her chest and pretended to be aghast at that revelation. Detective Smith smiled at her and leaned over a little. Meg had the distinct impression that he was attracted to her and she definitely could use that to her advantage a little.

"Don't worry, Meg. I will make sure no one hurts you."

Meg thanked him profusely and even squeezed his hand for a second too long before he took his leave, leaving her and Dr. Wheeler alone in her office.

Dr. Wheeler said nothing as Meg slowly began rolling towards the door. While she was there, she stopped and turned to the other woman.

"I really hope we don't have any more strange... visitations at night," she told Dr. Wheeler. "Don't you?"

If Wheeler had any more of those friends who were so down with murder, Meg never found out.

At the end of the week, Clarence returned for her.


	3. Chapter 3

He appeared at the door of the dayroom, interrupting her game of solitaire. He still wore the same suit and tie with the tan trench coat hanging over his shoulders. Did he ever change at all? Meg made a point of teasing him about it later. For now, she was incredibly relieved to see him.

In a strange way, he was the closest thing he had to a friend in this bitch of a life she had now. She had just moved her wheelchair away from the table when she realized that he hadn't come along.

A willowy redheaded woman was right next to him, dressed up in a beige shirt and mom jeans. She let out a cry and ran towards Meg moving her arms in exaggerated ways.

"Meg! My darling little lamb!" she exclaimed as she knelt in front of her chair and gave her a quick hug. She backed away and put a hand on her cheek, her sharp features contorted in a grimace as if she was barely holding back the tears. "Oh, dear, we thought we'd never see you again!"

She spoke with a strong Southern accent that was very different from the one she had when she hugged Meg again and whispered in her ear:

"Go along with it."

"You..." Meg said, frowning at her. "You are..."

"I'm your Aunt Ruth, of course!" the redheaded woman said and squeezed Meg's hands tight. "Oh, they told me you wouldn't remember me, but that's alright. I'm here now and I'm going to take you home."

Clarence and Detective Smith strolled right behind her. Clarence had the blank expression Meg was beginning to see was his trade mark, while Detective Smith frowned with skepticism.

"Meg, this man claims to be an investigative journalist," he explained. "And he says he has found your aunt."

"He doesn't just say it!" Aunt Ruth replied. "If it wasn't for Mr. Masters, I never would've seen my Meg again! Your mother and I, we were cousins, but we were as close as sisters. It broke her heart when you disappeared, but that doesn't matter anymore, because you're here!"

Wherever had Clarence got her, she definitely had a flair for acting. She searched inside her big bag and with a very dramatic gesture, she dropped a bunch of photographs and papers over Meg's card game.

She leaned over to look at them. They were pictures, alright, of a little girl in a pink dress doing thing such as acting in a school play or blow out the candles from a birthday cake. The most impressive one was one of herself in a graduation cap and robe, hugging her "Aunt Ruth", looking much younger than she was right now. It was a Photoshop job, but it was masterfully done. If she didn't know all of this was but an elaborate bull, she would've almost believed it.

She eyed Clarence, who gave her a little nod.

Of course. It would be much easier to leave the ward if a family member claim they would care for her and provide her with papers that would prove her identity.

There was a birth certificate among the papers. It looked pretty legit, claiming her name was Meg Prince and that she had been born at the tail end of the 80's.

Meg held it and understood right away this was her ticket away from Wheeler's machinations.

She slowly turned her head to the redheaded woman, widening her eyes ever so slightly.

"Aunt... Aunt Ruth?" she muttered.

If Detective Smith had more questions to ask, he had to save them for later, because "Aunt Ruth" broke down in loud sobs.

 

* * *

 

It was almost too easy from there. Detective Smith accepted the pictures and Meg suddenly regaining her memories as proof that "Aunt Ruth" was the real deal, but he didn't seem happy about it. Meg imagined it was because another guy had cracked the case open before he did.

Doctor Wheeler, on her part, looked incredibly happy to sign her release.

"Well... there you go, Meg," she said.

"I'll be honest. I am not going to miss you at all, doc."

Wheeler said nothing, but she seemed uncomfortable while “Aunt Ruth” and Clarence pushed Meg’s chair out of the ward.

Meg ignored her. As soon as she was out of the ward, she raised her head and breathed in. She had finally stopped wearing the hospital robes, instead changing for jeans, boots and a frankly nice shirt that Clarence had got for her, and it was a shame that she wasn’t allowed to keep it. She would’ve liked to burn it, just to finally feel completely free from the small, boring world of the ward and everything it had meant to her.

As it was, looking up at the sky that looked so much like Clarence’s eyes, at the cars passing in front of her and imagining Wheeler’s face now that she had finally escaped her grasp was enough to make her laugh out loud. She felt as if she was issuing a challenge, defying everything and everyone to come up for her and try to take this newfound freedom from her. She would fight tooth and nail for it and she knew in her bones that she could win.

“Well, then,” “Aunt Ruth” said. Her Southern drawl disappeared completely, replaced by a heavy Scottish accent: “You got what you wanted. Now, as we agreed…”

Clarence searched for something inside of his trench coat and extracted a small vial with something white inside of it. Meg barely had time to identify it as feathers before “Ruth” promptly made it disappear inside of her bag.

“Thank you, Rowena,” he said.

“A pleasure to help you, as always.” Rowena gave him a wide grin and then turned to Meg for a moment, looking at her pensively. “Have fun out there.”

She was a strange woman, Meg thought, as Rowena strutted down the street away from them, but she liked her. Clarence pushed her chair in the opposite direction. She had to laugh when she saw his ride.

“Really? You drive that?”

Clarence looked at his golden Lincoln Continental with a frown and turned back to her without a trace of embarrassment.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s… it’s…” Meg couldn’t even explain between her chuckles, so she just shook her head in defeat and let Clarence park her chair next to the passenger seat.

She was about to start he slow, inconvenient process of getting herself up from the chair and into the car (she imagined it wasn’t much different than climbing up and down from her hospital bed) when Clarence leaned over and picked her up as if she weighted no more than the feather that he had paid Rowena with. Delicately, put her down in the seat and closed the door before folding the chair and moving to the back to put it away in the trunk.

Meg had plenty of time to think in the time it took him to do all of that.

She should have been surprised about Clarence’s strange dealings with Rowena and she shouldn’t be so trusting of him that she would just let him manhandle her like that. She hadn’t even asked where they were going now and what he had planned for her. For all he knew, he could be like one of the guys that had tried to kill her at the hospital.

Though she doubted it. She watched him closely as he got behind the wheel.

“Is… is there something wrong?” he asked, his brow furrowed once again as if it wasn’t in his nature to stop worrying for once.

Meg decided she trusted him.

“No. Everything’s fine.”

Clarence watched her face closely for another moment, as if he was trying to discover whether she was lying to him or not, but in the end, he nodded and started the engine.

“So where are you whisking me off to, Clarence?” she asked him finally, with a smirk.

“Wichita, Kansas,” he replied. “It’s a four hour drive, so if you need us to stop at any moment, please let me know.”

“I think I’ll be fine,” Meg said, with a shrug. “What’s interesting about Wichita?”

“A friend managed to find an apartment for you. It has an elevator and the lease has been paid for this year, so you don’t need to worry about anything. It’s also reasonably sized city. You should be able to… blend in.”

“There are bigger cities,” she pointed.

“There are,” Clarence admitted, with a little nod. “But this one is only three hours away from my… from where I am staying currently. So I’ll be able to drop by and see you every now and then and you can call me if you need anything.”

That took her by surprise. After he had run away from her at the hospital, she’d thought that, for whatever reason, he wouldn’t want to see her again. Whether it was out of guilt or because doing so would end up exposing her to whatever life she had before, she expected that after taking her out of the ward, he would simply… let her fend for herself.

“Is that a problem?” he asked her, lowering his voice as if he was suddenly insecure about the entire thing. “Would you rather… I don’t… do that?”

She tilted her head a little and let a few seconds of silence pass by until he was forced to look at her. Apparently, he didn’t need to look at the road to know where the car was heading.

“No,” she said. “I think I’d like to see you again.”

He didn’t say anything, but she thought he saw his lips twitching as if he was barely holding back a smile.

 

* * *

 

During the trip, she told Clarence about Doctor Wheeler and the two men who had attacked her and saw how his hands held on tighter to the wheel.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice growing gruffer with anger. “You’ll be safe where I’m taking you.”

That confirmed two things that she didn’t think he would’ve answered if she’d asked him directly: that he had expected those sort of people coming after her, and that Kent and Olson (or… Walt and whatshisname) weren’t the only ones with an interest in having her stop breathing.

“Do you think I’ll have any more of these, uh… let’s call them, unpleasant visitors?”

He clenched his jaw, apparently realizing he’d revealed more than he intended.

“As long as you keep a low profile, I don’t see why you should,” he said, simply.

“Right. Low profile,” she muttered, turning her face to the window. “I’ll try to keep that mind.”

There was a silence that extended for several minutes while the Lincoln ate mile after mile. Clarence drove over the speed limit, but he seemed confident enough in what he was doing and Meg wasn’t overly concerned either.

She had the strange feeling that they would survive it if they crashed.

“You’re not going to ask me how I defended myself from those guys?”

“Well, you’re a resourceful woman, Meg,” Clarence said. “I can’t imagine it would be easy to take you down… so easily,” he finished clumsily. The meditative pause between his words made Meg think that he had been about say something else.

In the end, since neither of them needed a bathroom or a snack break (Meg was strangely not hungry, even though she’d only had the hospital’s lackluster breakfast that morning), they made it to Topeka in three hours and fifty minutes.

Her new apartment was on the third floor and just as Clarence had announced, the building counted with an elevator, so Meg would be perfectly able to come and go as she pleased. He still pushed her chair all the way up to the door. She knew he did it out of kindness for her, but after a while it became a little annoying. That was another thing she was discovering about herself: there was a limit to how much she could stand people babying her.

“Well… here we are,” he said.

Meg looked around. There wasn’t much: just a couch, a TV, a kitchenette to the side, a plastic table and a couple chairs, she supposed in case she wanted to ever have visits. Clarence had left her a computer and a phone on top of it.

“Charlie… my friend who set up all of this, she said that the computer is charged and ready,” he explained. “I’ve also filled the fridge with groceries, so you have something to eat. You have Wi-Fi and…”

Meg rolled towards the table and picked up the phone. It was brand new and it had a generic background. The only number it had archived was Clarence’s. She looked up at him to find him standing very rigidly in the middle of her small living room. Meg was beginning to understand that standing completely immobile was his version of being slightly fidgety and nervous.

She could understand that.

“Is there booze in this place?” she asked.

“Umh… yes,” he said. “It’s in the lower cabinet.”

He’d brought her at least three bottles of bourbon. She couldn’t remember whether she liked bourbon or not, but when she uncapped the lid and took a long swig of it, the smoky taste and the pleasant warmth of the liquor sliding down her throat felt somewhat familiar.

“A man after my own heart,” she said, smirking at Clarence.

He looked away from her and cleared his throat, awkwardly.

“Well, you… unless there’s anything else you need… I think I should be going…”

“Wait, no.” Meg turned around and got back to him quickly. “Stay a while. Have a drink with me.”

She didn’t know why she didn’t want him to leave. Maybe because she had found she was actually fond of him despite not knowing him all that well. Maybe she wanted to thank him, because he had gone above and beyond what she had asked him to do by providing this place and everything in it. Maybe because she didn’t want to be left alone so early to wonder what the hell she was supposed to do now.

She had the whole world, a whole life free from whatever worries plagued her before, extending in front of her, and she didn’t even know where to even begin.

In any case, Clarence was hesitant.

“I…” he began, but when Meg stretched her hand to touch his, he apparently forgot the excuse he was about to give her.

They sat together on the couch and had shot after shot of bourbon. Beyond her window (Meg was going to need to replace those ugly beige curtains, because whoever had chosen them had no taste), the afternoon passed and vanished into a brief twilight.

It was hard to keep a conversation going, because Clarence didn’t want to talk about the past and Meg didn’t want to think about the future. So they ended up, in the vaguest terms possible, talking about Clarence’s “work”.

“Right now, a friend of mine is… a different friend… he is in a lot of trouble. His brother and I have been trying to help him, but sometimes…” He stopped and took a deep breath. “Sometimes I doubt if we can.”

Meg took a swig of the bottle and passed it back to him. They had been drinking from glasses until a moment ago (or maybe it had been hours ago), but at some point they had decided those were too much of a hassle to bother with them.

“So you do this a lot, huh?” she commented.

Clarence tilted his head at her. He still seemed sober, despite how strong the liquor was and how they had already emptied two of the bottles and were working on the third. Meg herself only felt a slight, pleasant buzz. Some sort of instinct indicated her that she should much, much drunker than that, but she wasn’t interested in paying attention to it.

“Barging headfirst to try and help your friends,” Meg explained. “Trying to save everyone.”

He stayed in silence, as if he was thinking about that question intently.

“I don’t know,” he admitted in the end. “I try to do what’s right, but sometimes what’s right seems to change moment to moment. It’s all so… messy. I don’t know if I can save anyone.”

His speech wasn’t slurry, but his eyes did seem glassy and forlorn as he drank again. Meg’s heart flutter a little. He had been so confident and calm before, it was hard to believe there was this other side of him that looked so… lost. So confused.

“Well, you saved me,” Meg pointed out.

That startled him.

“Why would you say that?”

“From… the ward?” she pointed out.

“Oh.” Clarence relaxed again against the couch. “Well, I couldn’t leave you there.”

“Why not?”

That was one of the dangerous avenues of conversation that they had been avoiding all evening, but maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe Meg was finally feeling tired, but in any case, she didn’t want to keep avoiding it.

“You said it yourself. You’re my friend,” Clarence said.

He was a terrible liar. He couldn’t even look at her in the eye as he said that.

“Yeah… I think there’s more to it, though,” Meg replied, scooting closer to him. Her hand graze the side of his thigh and Clarence startled, but didn’t try to push her away. “I think you… like me.”

“Of course I like you,” Clarence said quickly. “Don’t you like everyone who is your friend?”

“You’re the only friend I have,” she pointed out.

Clarence tilted his head as if he was trying to wrap his head around that concept. Meg took the chance to scoot closer to him.

“The only one I remember, anyway,” she continued saying. She put an arm around his neck and carefully propped herself up in his lap. “And I think… that I do really like you.”

Clarence’s eyes widened and his lips parted as if he had been caught by surprise. He tried to say something, but Meg didn’t give him the chance. If he wasn’t picking up the hints she was throwing at him, perhaps it would be best if she simply… showed him.

His lips felt fever pitch hot against hers. She put a hand on his cheek and pulled him closer, her heart beating faster. He didn’t pull away, even going as far as to put a hand around her waist to hold her close. He even moaned softly when Meg opened her mouth to deepen the kiss. He tasted like something fresh, something strong and wild, like the charged air before a storm, like everything he would simply wash away everything she had been before and turn her into something new…

It was like the bourbon. A familiar, intoxicating taste she couldn’t get enough of.

Or maybe it really was over far too soon. Clarence put a hand on her shoulder and gently, bur firmly, pull her away from him.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Meg, I can’t… I can’t do this.”

“Why not?” She frowned. “Clarence, what’s wrong?”

His eyes were sad once more, the blue in them turned into something darker and profound. His hand dropped from her shoulder and found a place on her chest, right above his heart. Meg wondered if she could hear it beating.

“You don’t know who I am.”

“I know enough.”

The caused him to smile sadly at her.

“No. Not nearly.”

He put his hands on her waist again, but to Meg’s disappointment, it was to gently coax her into sitting back down on the couch. He stood up and walked away, as if he couldn’t bear to stay close to her another moment.

“You… you’ve been given the chance to start again,” he said. “And I fear the longer I stay here, the more I’m taking that away from you.”

“Was it really all that bad?”

“No. There were some good memories.” He leaned against the wall and again smiled with sadness at her. “But they’re not worth it if it means you being hurt by the bad all over again.”

That angered Meg. She leaned back and she was proud of her icily her next words came out:

“Why did you come to visit me at the hospital, then?”

“I’m entirely too selfish to stay away from you.”

Meg could understand that. She looked away, because she really felt like his eyes were blazing and she couldn’t hold his gaze for long.

“So what do we do now?”

He thought it over for a moment.

“I will try leaving you alone, Meg,” he promised, stepping closer to the couch once more. “And please promise me you will try healing, living this life as best as you can.”

He leaned over and Meg closed her eyes, expecting another kiss. Instead, Clarence pressed his lips against her forehead and backed away quickly. He was out of the apartment before she had the chance to call his name once again.

She didn’t know why she felt as if something had carved her heart out of her chest and the bourbon didn’t really make it any better. She spent the first night of her wonderful new life crying her eyes out on the couch.


	4. Chapter 4

The following day, Meg decided she didn’t want to be that way. She didn’t want to be sad or resentful and she definitely didn’t want to spend the time in her apartment, staring at those ugly curtains and thinking about a past that had she was not going to get back.

So instead, she ripped the curtains away (it wasn’t hard, she just had to pull hard enough to get them to come down but not too hard that she would bring the entirety of the window frame down) and set out into the world to find out what she could really do.

The first thing she discovered was that it was hard to move with her foldable chair. It was fine for the apartment, but it got stuck on the asphalt all the time and if she had been an ordinary person, her arms would have been tired of turning the wheels.

So first things first: she needed a better chair. Which meant, money. Which meant, a job.

The uncomfortable sensation of aimlessness in the back of her head dissipated once she had set an objective for herself.

She stopped by a corner and looked around. What was she good at? Well, except for manipulating people and having super hearing. And telekinesis. She figured she could be some sort of superhero, but she immediately discarded that idea. Her wheelchair couldn’t carry her to danger fast enough and besides, just the thought of people crowding around her, trying to talk to her or thank her for what she’d done for them… it sounded exhausting.

And besides, being a do-gooder didn’t pay, did it?

The map in the phone Clarence had left her indicated there was a park nearby. She rolled herself over there and park her chair next to a stone bench. It was Saturday morning, which meant a lot of children running around, making a nuisance of themselves as the screamed and threw balls at each other. Some people were walking their dogs or walking hand in hand. Meg looked away from them with a grimace of disgust.

There was a crowd observing something with attention. Having nothing better to do, Meg moved towards them and tapped a woman on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she said. The woman gave her a look full of pity and moved away.

It wasn’t hard to part the crowd and get closer to whatever it was that they were watching. Meg supposed none of them wanted to be mean to the crippled girl. She smiled to herself, thinking that they had no idea.

The thing that had them all so enthralled was a street con. His table was a big cartoon box covered with a green cloth, upon which he quickly shuffled three cards turned over.

“Find the ace, ladies and gentlemen!” he dared to his captive audience. “Just for five dollars, you have to find three chances to find the ace! If you get it right three times, then you can take away the entirety of my winnings for the day. That’s right!” He dramatically pointed at the can that had several five and ten dollar bills sticking out. “I am betting all the money people have bet today! You can hit the jackpot if only you can find the aces three times! Who’d like to try? Maybe you, mister? How about you, miss? Come on, don’t be shy!”

Meg watched in silence as a couple people came forwards, paid the five dollar and tried to win a game that was rigged against them. For starter, the man shuffled his cards really fast, so it was easy to get his challenger dizzy and confused about the fate of the ace. And second, he cheated.

She caught on right away. Every time someone guessed the ace’s location correctly twice in a row, the man made a swift move to slide it inside his sleeve and replace it with another card immediately. Everyone else seemed oblivious of the trick, but she caught on pretty fast. The challenger would inevitably fail the third time and walk away five dollars poorer while the conman lamented that they had run out of luck.

So, she could definitely work with this.

“Ah, too bad! Better luck next time!” the conman told the latest challenger to fail. “Well, anyone else? Come on, we’re just getting started! No one? No one wants to try and seduce Lady Luck next?”

The faces around him were distrustful. Obviously they all suspected that he was playing them, but they just couldn’t figure out how, exactly. No one was going to step forwards and the conman was probably going to pick all his stuff and leave soon to con people somewhere else. Meg decided this was her chance.

“I’ll play,” she offered herself.

The conman looked at her with surprise. The wheelchair gave him pause, but he obviously didn’t have enough of a moral fiber to not try to scam her after all.

“Alright, very well!” he exclaimed, smiling and beckoning her to come closer. “Our friend is daring enough to take up the challenge!”

Meg took out her wallet and put the five dollars inside of the can without a care. After all, she was planning on walking away with the entirety of it.

“We all know the rules of the game!” the conman explained as he shuffled the cards quickly. “She has three chances to find the ace…”

Meg followed the movement of his hands with her gaze while he bombastically explained once again what they were doing there, as if it was really necessary. He finally stopped shuffling and pointed at the cards with an inviting smile. Meg pretended to think about it and then stretched her hand to tap the middle card.

“What do you know?” the guy said, lifting up the ace so everyone would see it. The people around them clapped with only mild enthusiasm. They had seen the first person get it right once too many times. “One out of three! Let’s try again!”

Meg once again looked at the cards intently, but she wasn’t actually focusing on them. She was looking at the conman’s left sleeve, where she knew he was hiding the card he’d used to replace the ace once she got it right again.

It wasn’t like moving the bed or throwing someone out of the window. That had been an outburst of an energy she hadn’t known she could control, a moment of pure despair. This required her to be more subtle, more in control. She just needed the card to slide slowly out of his sleeve and fall down without him realizing it…

Luckily for her, the conman finished shuffling right then and once again, with dramatic gesturing, invited her to look for the ace. Meg kept her eyes on his sleeve for another moment and then tapped the right card once more.

“Oh, okay, that’s some luck right there!” the conman exclaimed, his smile wider than before.

The crowd around them cheered with a little more interest now. Meg could sense exactly what they were thinking ç. Maybe this time the guy was really going to lose. After he had been scamming them out of their money, maybe someone would finally get the upper hand on him. Or maybe he wouldn’t dare do that to an invalid person, would he? No. He couldn’t.

Meg knew he would _try_ , though. She also knew he wouldn’t succeed this time.

The change in his face was subtle she was certain she was the only one who noticed it. His eyes grew slightly wider and his mouth tightened up in a line. A single drop of sweat appeared on his temple as he kept fumbling with the cards for longer than any other time, as if he couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that his trick wasn’t going to work this time…

“Hey, man, what are you trying to do?” a guy from the crowd asked.

“Yeah, you’ve shuffled them enough!” another lady added. “Let her guess!”

In any other occasion, Meg would’ve felt a little offended that these people had the need to defend her. But she loved it this time because it made the conman all the more nervous.

“Alright, alright,” he muttered, as he finally laid the cards in front of Meg. “Go ahead then.”

Meg picked up the card and made an effort to pretend that she was just as surprised as everyone else while the crowd erupted into applause and cheers. The conman was sweating profusely and staring at her open-mouthed, as if he couldn’t quite figure out how he had been so dumb to let this happen.

“Guess that means I hit the jackpot,” Meg said, waving the ace with a grin while the people around her laughed.

“Okay, well…” the conman stammered. “I mean… lady, come on… those are my earnings for the day…”

“A deal’s a deal,” Meg said, with a little shrug. “Sorry.”

The conman looked around, searching for someone who would get on his side. Nobody did: everyone was a little irked at having lost against him and Meg was a pretty girl in a wheelchair. She inspired sympathy.

“Come on!” the same guy as before said. “You gotta keep your word!”

“Yeah, man, are you really going to not let her get her prize?”

The crowd exploded in shouts of agreement. The conman reached his hand towards the can stuffed of bills, his face pale and panicky. But in the end, he beamed at Meg and let out a laugh no one but her noticed was forced.

“Very well! You’ve won fair and square!” he said, pushing the can towards Meg. She picked it up with a gracious smile, while the crowd cheered once more.

The conman picked up his “table” afterwards. Some people approached Meg to congratulate her and ask her if “she needed anything”. Meg assured them she was fine and she lived nearby. In fact, the sun was setting and she should go home soon. Not because she was scared of criminals or something like that. She just wanted to count her earnings and device her next plan.

The conman had actually given her an idea about how she could get some quick bucks. It was a shame that he decided to follow her and try to rob her.

Well, a shame for him, really.

Meg caught on to what he was doing several blocks away. His stare was like a stinging in the back of her neck and as she tried to figure whether she should take a sharp turn and try to lose him, something else happened: she began hearing his thoughts.

He was of two minds, so to speak.

_She did something. You know she did. There’s no other way she could’ve won._

_You just let the card slip. It was your fault. Come on, what are you gonna do? Are you really gonna stab her?_

_The crippled bitch cheated! We need the money!_

He had a small pocket knife with him. He needed the money to pay his drug dealer. Meg quickly find out all of this while the conman followed through streets where people were getting sparser and sparser.

The street in front of her apartment was well lit, but there were a couple before it that were a little darker. Meg purposefully took a turn through one of them and started rolling slower, as if her arms were tired of maneuvering the wheels. There was no one there except for a couple walking together hand in hand. They turned left and disappeared.

So now, Meg was left alone with her pursuer.

She stopped near the corner and pretended to rest, even stretching her hands above her head as if she was very much tired. The conman’s heart and breathing got faster, his thoughts became more frantic. Mg could hear his footsteps getting louder and louder…

She turned around just as he was about to reach her and grinned wide at him.

“Do you need something?” she asked him kindly.

He had his knife out and his eyes were wide and desperate.

“Bitch!” he called her and lunged himself forwards.

Meg closed her fist slowly, imagining the guy’s throat was in her grip.

He choked and dropped the knife, taking both his hands to his chest as he struggled to breathe. He scratched at his throat, his eyes widening in terror as he realized there was nothing there.

Meg let out a soft chuckle. It was terrible, she knew it. But for what that asshole had called her in his mind and what he was planning to do to her, he deserved a little bit of suffering.

After some long seconds of his coughing and thrashing on the ground, Meg slowly unclenched her fist. She wanted him awake and just a little bit scared for what she had to say to him. She rolled her wheelchair closer to him.

“Look at me,” she whispered. It was enough for him to hear her, though, because he lifted his eyes. “You’re not going to tell anybody what happened here and you’re not going to follow me ever again. The next time, I’m gonna push you into oncoming traffic, do you hear me?”

He nodded, painfully. His eyes were flood with tears.

“Get out of my sight!” she ordered.

The conman struggled to his feet, half crawling and half stumbling at first as a drunk man. When he had taken several breaths, he started walking faster and running like his life depended on it. In a way, it did.

Meg turned her chair and headed for her apartment, already forgetting about him.

There were a couple hundred dollars in the can. It wasn’t much, but it was start and it would do. Meg turned on the laptop that Clarence had provided her with and searched around for a while.

She was going to need a deck of tarot cards.


	5. Chapter 5

Installing her “business” was surprisingly easy.

It turned out, a psychic with the correct eyeshade color and a physical disability had a certain mystique about her and it attracted enough clients that Meg never went home with less than a hundred bucks in her pocket. She didn’t need any more: she had discovered she could go days without really eating and it was way more fun to blow her money on booze and cigarettes anyway.

She claimed a corner a few blocks away from her home near a hippie store with a bead curtain on the door that sold new-agey things like scented candles, non-precious stones and dehydrated tomatoes. She figured it’d attract the kind of clientele who was easily convinced that tarot cards contained all the truths of the universe and she wasn’t wrong. She didn’t have to do much, just put a folding table with a dark blue tablecloth decorated with stars and moon and a sign that advertised readings for ten dollars. In less than ten minutes she already had three or four girls wearing “esoteric” clothes looking at her with curiosity while Meg calmly smoked a cigarette and shuffled her cards.

Her first client was a young college girl. She sat down in the stool Meg had provided for her clients and put down her backpack to the side. Without even looking, Meg knew right away that she had bought stuff that promised to help her concentrate in her studies and achieve academically. She had been an advanced place student in high school, but now she was struggling. She was a little desperate, but not enough not to ask skeptically:

“Can you really see the future?”

“Of course,” Meg told her, arching an eyebrow. “If you don’t believe it, just go. You’re taking time away from other people.”

The girl hesitated for a few seconds, but she took out her wallet and put the money inside of Meg’s can of contribution, the same way she had taken from the conman that had tried jumping her. Meg smiled at the girl and started setting the cards on the table. She had read about the different kind of spreads and oracles on the Internet and she was convinced most of them were bullshit. But she supposed she should know about them anyway, just in case a tarot aficionado happened to sit in front of her and she needed to keep the charade.

Turned out, she shouldn’t have bothered. As long as she told people exactly what they wanted to hear, they were happy enough not to even look at the card she was putting in front of them.

“You need to be more confident,” Meg told the college girl. “You’re smart enough to handle it, but your crippling self-doubt is going to make you second-guess every answer you give at the exam. Just go with your first choice and you’ll find you’re probably right.”

The girl sighed with pure relief.

“Thank you!” she exclaimed shaking Meg’s hand.

Stacy (that was her name) became one of Meg’s regulars, along with Patricia the Hippie Store’s Owner and Mark the Secretly Superstitious Business Guy. They visited at least once a week to make sure whatever they were doing with their lives was the right choice. Meg limited herself to assure them they were, hoped nothing would fuck them up too hard. If it did, she could always say it was because they had “doubt in their hearts” and hoped they wouldn’t blame her.

At the end of the day, she packed up everything and hailed for a cab. Usually she could con a Good Samaritan to place the table and the stool on the trunk of the car or the driver accepted a tip to help her take those things to her building’s lobby. Meg imagined that when she had her new chair (she had been looking at models on the Internet and decided she wanted a scooter), she could load it all in a supermarket cart latched on to it and truck it along to her corner. It was a satisfying thought.

In the long nights when she laid awake drinking bourbon, however, she wondered what she would do after she’d got the chair. Would she continue being Meg the Friendly Psychic? What for? What she was going to do with the money? She had a comfortable life, but it was way too simple. She was always edging the same abysmal boredom that had invaded her in the hospital ward and she knew it was a matter of time until she stumbled headfirst into it. She’d probably do something that went against Clarence’s “low profile” advice and fuck it all up.

On those occasions, she toyed with her phone and looked longingly at his number. Many times she thought about calling and telling him that she was done having a “normal life”, that she didn’t care how bad the life she’d had before had before had been, it couldn’t be worse than this constant ennui. She wanted back in. She wanted to feel again the way she had while they were making out on her couch.

Sometimes she wondered if she could just give him a booty call. If she would come and kiss her again with the same intensity and that taste of stormy weather so uniquely his, and then carry her to the bed and just fuck her over and over until they were both exhausted. Not talk at all about the past or the present, just picked up from they’d left off the last time they’d seen each other. Maybe sex was the key to finally help her rest, but every time she looked at a handsome man or a pretty woman on the street, she found herself comparing the size of their hands or the color of their eyes to Clarence’s.

Meg was convinced they’d had something in the past. Why else would he have bothered to do everything he’d done for her otherwise? She wished she could remember it, she wished she could find the words to convince him that he wasn’t as fragile as he seemed to think, that she could handle him and whatever fucked up world he was hiding her from.

But she always put down the phone at the last second. She instinctively knew he would come running to see her and try to convince her that this was the best for her and she knew she wouldn’t believe it.

And so, she continued her lonely, quiet life as a ten-dollar psychic.

 

* * *

 

Of course, if she’d been an actual psychic, perhaps she could have seen it coming.

She was advising a couple that was not going to last. She knew because he was cheating on her with a co-worker. It was a delicate balance, because if she outright told that to them, the woman, who was brimming with barely contained anger, was going to flip her table and put on a show and Meg could probably kiss that day’s earning goodbye.

“You need to have an honest chat,” Meg told them, glaring at the guy who was sweating like a sinner in church. “There are some things that each of you have been trying to confess and it’s time you got that out of her chest…”

She caught something out of the corner of her eye. An extravagantly dressed woman had just come out of the hippie store, carrying a weave basket as if she was Little Red Riding Hood, and stopped to stare at Meg. She was wearing a long dress and what appeared to be a black cape. That wouldn’t have been too strange (all sort of colorful characters came in and out of that store), except because Meg knew this woman.

The last time she’d seen it she had been wearing mom jeans, though.

“Well?” the wife urged her. Meg turned her eyes back to her and smiled.

“I suggest go somewhere public to have that conversation. The sooner the better.”

“Come on, honey, this is a scam!” the husband said, turning away from her. The wife stood up hesitantly.

“Good luck, Roger!” Meg shouted in their wake.

That made them pause, because none of them had told her their name. The wife turned to her husband with fire in her eyes, but Meg had stopped paying attention to them. The woman in the cape had crossed the street and was standing before her table, looking at her with a horrified expression.

“What’s all this?” she exclaimed.

“Hello, Aunt Ruth,” Meg greeted her with a smirk. “Nice seeing you again.”

“What are you doing?” Rowena asked, looking at her up and down as if she was mildly scandalized. “Tarot cards? Really?”

“I’m just trying to make an honest living,” Meg said, a little irritated but her flippancy.

“Oh, honey, no.” Rowena moved the stool and sat down in front of her. “There’s nothing honest about what you’re doing and we both know it.”

“What are you even doing here?” Meg asked, rolling her eyes.

“Supply run.” Rowena lifted up the basket for her to see. “Those little new age places sometimes have some really powerful things and they don’t even know about it. You wouldn’t know suspect the things dear Patricia keeps in the back.”

“Well, good for her and for you, I guess. You’re scaring away my clients, though, so unless you want a reading…”

Rowena looked down at the spread that Meg had set on the table for the couple in crisis and then slowly raised her eyes back at her.

“Let me take you out for lunch.”

“I don’t need to eat,” Meg commented casually. Rowena didn’t seem surprised or upset by that information.

“But you can enjoy a good meal,” she pointed out. “And I happen to know a good restaurant nearby that serves a great steak with a wonderful pinot noir…”

“Why do you even want to eat with me?”

Rowena’s grin made her face look even sharper.

“I have a business proposal for you.”

That piqued Meg’s curiosity enough for her to agree. Maybe it had to do a little bit of her restlessness and boredom too. She asked Patricia From the Hippie Store to keep her foldable table and stools (“Of course! Why didn’t you ask before?”) and went with Rowena.

It turned out she had exaggerated a little when she said the restaurant was “nearby”, but at least she had the delicacy to pay for the cab.

“You could be doing so much more than just scamming people out of petty cash,” Rowena told her as soon as they were sat in the restaurant with glasses of the promised pinot noir in their hand. “You could be scamming them for some actual, good cash, for example.”

“And how do you propose I do that?”

Rowena sipped a little of her glass of wine, still with that grin upon her face that made Meg think that woman was full of secrets.

“Good advertisement can go a long way,” she commented. “I happen to be in contact with certain… people in high places that would pay good money to know the result of some of their business transactions before they proceed with them.”

Meg tilted her head. She had thought about getting Mark the Superstitious Businessman to send his buddies to her, but they either didn’t care for what she could tell them or they wouldn’t spit out any professional secrets. Rowena, apparently, knew a Mark or two.

“The problem with that would be if the business transaction doesn’t turned out just as I predicted,” she pointed out. “That would generate a certain… mistrust.”

“Well, luckily for us, I happen to have a little bit of… influence, over the results of the business transaction themselves,” Rowena said, with a soft shrug.

“So you could make my predictions come true. And I suspect those results would benefit you?”

“But of course!” Rowena admitted freely with a laugh. “I just need someone who isn’t me to tell the fat cat to put the dominoes in place. It would make it so much easier for me when the time comes to… topple them.” She mimicked pushing an invisible domino with the tip of her very long nail.

Meg finished her glass of wine. What Rowena was proposing was very interesting, but…

“I’m not sure. Clarence warned to keep a low profile.”

“Oh, him.” Rowena rolled her eyes. “The way he was talking about you, it got me believing he was going to lock you up in a glass case and keep you there forever. Men worry too much, darling. I’m sure you can handle whatever comes your way.”

Meg was aware that Rowena was flattering her in an attempt to see things her way. That didn’t mean it wasn’t working.

“Alright, I’m in,” she decided. “But I want a cut.”

The rest of the lunch was one long negotiation, where they discussed percentages and days of the week. They finished two more bottles of wine and though Rowena had a head for alcohol, she obviously couldn’t keep up with Meg. By the time the waiter brought them the dessert, Rowena’s cheeks were red and she was giggling a lot more frequently. Meg managed to get everything she wanted and they shook hands over the table.

“Alright, alright!” Rowena said, rising her glass of wine. “To the beginning of a beautiful friendship!”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Meg agreed. And they toasted.

 

* * *

 

That was the beginning of Meg’s stint as the greatest psychic of Wichita. In her opinion, it was a step up: she didn’t have to get out of the house as much and the money was definitely better. She got a couple of colorful curtains and lamps that bathed her small living room in ethereal violet light, brought some scented candles and incense sticks from Patricia (“I’m so happy you’re sharing your gift with more and more people!”) and her Tarot cards began to look respectfully worn out.

Rowena took advertisers for her on the Internet and some chosen newspapers and magazines and the clients just came pouring in. There was no shortage of sucker who were willing to pay for someone to tell them what they wanted to hear, that was for sure. Suddenly, Clarence’s number wasn’t the only one on Meg’s phone: a small group of regulars that dropped by her house every couple of weeks (and in some extreme, neurotic cases, every week) kept ringing or texting her, anxious to see what “the cards” would have to say about their destiny.

And then there were what Meg called “the fat cats”. She had no idea where Rowena got them or how she’d wormed her way into their circle of influence, but they all looked slightly the same: middle-aged men in casual clothes who were “visiting the town for the weekend” and “came recommended”; they didn’t think all of this was true, of course, but it didn’t hurt to ask, did it? Some had New York accents, other had Californian tans. It wasn’t hard to imagine any of them wearing expensive tailored suits on their regular lives. Meg charged them double than she did for regular clients and told them the predictions that she had agreed upon beforehand with Rowena over the phone.

“Yes, you should make that investment. No, you should hold on to that house for a week longer or so; a new buyer will turn up. A divorce would be disastrous for you, I suggests couple’s therapy.”

They all left her apartment with relieved faces and the following day, the money appeared punctually in Meg’s bank account. She was able to buy her mobility scooter with a cushioned chair soon enough and she took it to a garage nearby where they were happy to paint it red and add flames to it. Meg didn’t know why she chose fire to decorate it. It just felt fitting.

Also, she was beginning to think maybe there wasn’t a next big thing to look forwards to. She enjoyed scamming the fat cats and it was nice to see all sort of people come and go and pour their heart and problems out to her. Perhaps her job was the rewards, rather than the means to a reward and she just needed to start seeing that way.

She wondered how long she’d be entertained thinking along those lines before boredom and aimlessness fuck her up again.

But greedy businessmen and people looking for general life advice they could’ve got on the Internet instead of paying a fake psychic for weren’t the only members of Meg’s clientele. Every now and then, a police officer or FBI agent, looking for her help to solve a missing persons or a murder case. The ones who were actual officers of the law were generally good people, dedicated to their jobs and genuinely out of clues about the mystery that was haunting them. Meg could respect that and turned them down alleging “bad vibrations” from looking into cases like that. In any case, her mind reading didn’t work with them, because she could only find out things about the person standing in front of her, not about someone who was dead, so she even if she’d wanted to help them, it wasn’t within her power. They left disappointed, but with the sensation that at least they’d tried.

The problem were the ones who claimed to be police officers, but weren’t.

They always came in pairs without an appointment and gave her fake names along with flashing their fake badges. They moved with professional demeanor and asked her questions about recent murders or disappearances in Wichita or nearby small towns. They weren’t like the real police officers: there questions were too specific and too intense, as if they were taking anything Meg would tell them with the seriousness of an actual clue. They reminded her of Kent and Olson, and she had no doubt in her mind they were just as dangerous as them.

It wasn’t too hard to get rid of them, though. She just she started babbling about their non-existent children or wives (none of these guys had family) or gave purposefully wrong information about where they’d grown up or what were there hobbies. After a while, they thanked her for their time (Meg made them pay for it and none of them was rude enough to refuse a woman in a wheelchair) and left. She was surprised at how much harder it was to convince people that she was a fraud than of her being the real thing.

She also didn’t like those men. She had the feeling that is she talked for too long with them, she’d end up pulling back a curtain and finding out things she didn’t really want to know. Clarence’s voice still rang in her ears every time one of these people walked into her apartment.

One of these days, however, she feared her boredom might win over his warnings.

But no one warned her about the caller that came one day.

“Hello?”

There was a short silence on the other end, as if the person had been caught off guard by her picking up at the first ring.

“Uh… yes, hi. Am I speaking with Marjorie Prince?”

The person at the other end of the line sounded young and somehow insecure. Meg wondered if this was a prank call that some teenager was playing on her.

“The one and only. What can I do for you?”

“I was hoping you’d give me an appointment?” the boy said. “For the day after tomorrow, if it’s possible?”

“How did you get this number?” Meg asked, frowning.

“From… I got it from Rowena.”

That was new. Usually the people who used Rowena’s name as a password were older and significantly more confident than this stammering boy. Maybe he was the son of one of the fat cats they were scamming?

“What’s your name, darling?”

“Jack Kline. I need your help to find a missing person.”


	6. Chapter 6

She told Jack Kline that she usually didn’t take missing persons requests, but that she could make an exception for a friend of Rowena’s. In hindsight, Meg should’ve probably called her and asked her to explain to her who exactly was this Jack kid, but… she was curious.

Over the phone, he’d sounded like a shy, hesitant person, and very, very young, so Meg wasn’t expecting him to be a tall grown ass young man when he called to her door three days later. Well, a lot of people looked tall from Meg’s perspective those days. But there was also a softness in his right blue eyes as he lowered his blue eyes at her, surprised, because obviously he had been expecting to find a person standing in front of him when she opened the door.

“Uh… Miss Prince?”

“Call me Meg,” she told him, smiling. “You’re Jack, aren’t you? Come right in.”

Meg had just finished a séance with a grieving widow trying to contact her husband on the other side. It wasn’t a hard trick to make: flickering lights, shaking tables and some words of consolation: that he was in a better place now, that he loved her and wanted her to be happy, yadda, yadda. People ate it up even more than the Tarot cards bullshit. She’d decided to keep the atmosphere after the widow had left, so her apartment was bathed in ethereal violet light and smelled strongly like jasmine from one of Patricia’s scented candles.

Jack walked in, looking cautiously around, as if he wasn’t quite certain of what he was doing yet. He had a brown manila folder closely clutched to his chest that he left on the table where Meg did her “predictions” as he sat down in front of her. Meg examined his face closely in the dim light. There was something about him that was just so… familiar. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“Well, like I explained to you on the phone, Jack, I usually don’t do missing person cases…”

“I know,” he interrupted her, a little too eagerly. “I just… I’m sorry. I have gone through half a dozen other psychics before now and none of them were able to help me.”

That surprised Meg. Where had this kid even found half a dozen other psychics, let alone paying them? And more importantly:

“What makes you think I’ll succeed where the others have failed?”

“Well, you’re friends with Rowena, aren’t you?”

“Friends is a little too strong a term,” Meg admitted. “We’re more like… associates.”

“You must be more powerful than the others,” Jack insisted, as if he hadn’t heard a word of what she’d said. He lowered his eyes, realizing he had come on too strong and he apologized again: “I’m sorry. I just… I really need to find him.”

Meg shifted gears in her mind. It was something she had learned to do: she could shut people off just as easily as she could read them. It wasn’t a hard ability to learn, which made Meg suspect she’d known how to control it all along and it was just… mind-muscle memory. She had found that vulnerable people, people who were desperate to find an easy answer to a problem that definitely didn’t have it, opened their thoughts up for her for an open book that Meg could leaf through and find exactly what they were expecting to hear. Other people, people who were more confident about themselves and strong-willed, had minds that were harder to breach.

She was surprised to find out that Jack belonged to this second category. When he’d walked in, she’d thought that he was a timid child talking about something he didn’t fully grasp. But now that she was trying to take a peek inside of his mind, she found it was… complex. There was a firm resolution to find whoever this missing person was and this was clearly at the forefront of his thoughts, but also… there was a twinge of fear of several different things that Meg couldn’t quite perceive, and unexpected anger, and even, deep underneath all of those layers, an undercurrent sadness that she didn’t know if he was even aware of.

But she couldn’t get any personal information out of him, like his age or his parents’ names or things like that that were usually very easy to pick up from someone and use it to make them believe she was able to see into their past and therefore into their future. Either someone had taught Jack to shield himself from people trying to intrude in his mind or he was instinctively adept at doing so.

In any case… this kid was much more than he seemed.

Curioser and curioser.

“Who are we talking about, again?” she asked, hoping the silence between his last sentence and hers hadn’t been long enough for him to notice what she was trying to do.

“My friend,” Jack said, his hands on top of the manila folder. “He was taken away and it… it was my fault.”

The last sentence came out as a soft whisper, as if admitting it out loud was almost too painful for him.

“I know the others think it,” he continued. “They don’t say it, but… I know they think all of this happened because of me.”

“Sounds to me that you have a bit of self-aggrandizing problem,” Meg said. Jack frowned at her, confused. “Not everything revolves around you, kid. And not everything is your fault.”

“No, you don’t understand. This _is_ my fault,” Jack insisted.

Meg decided there was no point in trying to convince him otherwise and changed the subject:

“Okay, then. Let’s see what you got in there.”

The folder, just as Jack, contained a lot more than Meg had expected: newspaper articles, some of them concerning gruesome deaths of religious leaders around the country, weather reports of strange phenomena, maps with circles on the places where these things had occurred and… pictures.

These were the ones that called Meg’s attention the most. There were pictures of two men, one with longer hair and the other wearing a plaid shirt, sitting on a table and toasting with their bottles of beer. One had long hair, the other was wearing a plaid shirt and she could almost swear…

_Bitch._

The word sounded so clearly in her head that she looked up at Jack, but it hadn’t been his voice. He was too busy explaining what all of those things meant.

“Michael took Dean three months ago and ever since…” he said.

“Wait… who’s Dean?” Meg asked, blinking, because suddenly she had a hard time concentrating.

Jack pointed at the man in the plaid shirt in the picture. Meg would’ve sworn she had never seen him before in her entire life, but something about him… him and the other guy…

It was like an itch in a spot just barely out of her reach. The same sensation she’d had when she saw Clarence again. She missed half of Jack’s explanations.

“… there were demonic omens all over this area, yes? For weeks. I don’t know what they were trying to do, but… a lot of people died,” he said, pointing at constellation of spots in his map, drawn with red marker. “Then, all of the sudden, it just… stopped. I think the angels did something there and I’m not sure what is. Sam said I shouldn’t worry about it, but…”

“Woah, woah, kid, slow down.” Meg shook her head. The unsettling sensation was becoming even stronger with every word Jack spoke. “Angels? Demons? What are you…?

“It’s just as it was on the other world,” Jack insisting, completely ignoring the fact that Meg still had no clue what he meant. “First, they’re going to eliminate all the demons, and it won’t be hard, because Lucifer is dead…”

_Trust me, child. Everything happens for a reason._

Deep grey eyes. He carried himself like a prince. No, like a God.

She was feeling sick. The room was spinning around her.

“… they don’t have a King, so they can’t organize a defense…”

_Sorry, love. I am your King now, and if you don’t like it… well, we can always have you drawn and quartered until you change your mind._

A slimy smirk upon his lips. He always wore a red flower on his lapel. Meg never liked how much of a social climber he was. What was his name? Alistair?

No, Crowley. Alistair had been her teacher.

_The best torturers never get their hands dirty, my lamb._

He proceeded to demonstrate exactly what he meant. The screams he could rip from the people on his rack sounded like a symphony.

_Learn everything you can from him. You need to refine your techniques, girl. I will have a very special mission for you soon._

The satisfaction in her father’s yellow eyes, how pointy were the teeth on his prideful beam.

_He won’t tell us anything. He has some sort of big endgame in mind, but he won’t tell us what it is._

_Maybe he won’t tell you because you’re going to fuck everything up._

_I’m serious, sister. These aren’t some normal hunters he’s sending us after._

He was right. Normal hunters wouldn’t have known how to kill them.

She’d seen it happen. They’d shot him right in the middle of the forehead. And their father had let it happen to get closer to them.

The Winchester.

_Bitch._

She’d gone after them against her father’s explicit desires, but she hadn’t killed them she’d had the chance.

And now her family was dead. They were all dead. Her father and all the other Princes of Hell, because they would’ve claimed the leadership if they were alive. Lilith. Alistair. Her brother. Even Crowley.

Even Lucifer.

Meg closed her eyes. Jack’s voice kept coming to her from a distance, but she wasn’t listening to him anymore. Darkness simmered into her eyes and her apartment disappeared from her sight.

 

* * *

 

She came to on her couch, with Rowena’s face hovering over her and holding her hand.

“Oh, dear,” she muttered. “That did not turn out as I expected.”

Meg blinked rapidly several times. She had the feeling she had been sleeping for far too long. Her thoughts were still hazy, as if all the memories that had come back running back to her were still trying to find their place in her mind.

There were still dark spots, but she had recovered most of it. Azazel and Hell and how she had been chosen, how she been turned and transformed and given a purpose, a mission to follow…

Her heart skipped a beat and she sat up too suddenly. The room spun around her again, so Rowena had no problem gently pushing her back down. There were voices coming from the kitchen, and it took a moment before Meg could make out the words:

“You should have never come without telling us!”

“I had to try it! Didn’t you say we had to exhaust all resources, that we could leave no stone unturned?”

That was Jack. Meg hadn’t expected that gentle boy that had sat in front of her across the table to have such anger and frustration in his voice.

“You said that we had to try everything…”

“Not on your own, Jack! You didn’t know who this person was. As far as you’re concerned, it could have been a trap!”

Sam. That was Sam. The last time she’d seen him…

_No Cas in the backseat. Your stone is long gone._

The anger in Crowley’s eyes, the cold sharp pain of the blade in her gut. Instinctively, Meg rubbed her hand over the spot. The roaring of the Impala’s motor as it sped away from her had been the last thing she’d heard as she laid in the cold concrete floor and then… nothing.

She’d woken up five years late next to a random highway, naked and scared and with no idea of who or where she was.

“They left me to die,” she understood suddenly. “Those bastards left me to die!”

“Hush, darling!” Rowena warned her. “You’re running on a fever. Here.”

And she handed her a glass of the oldest medication of the world: a glass of booze. Meg downed the bourbon in one gulp and despite Rowena’s warnings and requests for her to not move, she sat up. The night had fallen outside of her window and someone had removed the violet cloths from her lamps, so the living room looked alarmingly illuminated.

“Where’s my chair?”

“I don’t think that’s a good…”

“Rowena, I swear to Hell, if you don’t get out of my way…!”

Meg didn’t have to finish her threat. Rowena lifted her hands as if to indicate that she wasn’t going to get in her way anymore. Meg spotted her scooter against the opposite wall and with a gesture of her hand, she pulled it towards her. It rolled towards her out of its own volition and Meg climbed on it.

She didn’t care anymore that Rowena found out about her telekinetic powers. She’d probably known about them all along. She had failed to mention she was aware Meg was a demon. Such a great friend she’d turned out to be.

As if she had read Meg’s thoughts, she raised her hands defensively.

“Darling, I want you to know, I had nothing to do with any of this. It was all Castiel’s idea.”

_Yes, I remember the pizza man._

Meg shook her head. She didn’t want to think about him. She didn’t want to remember the fondness she’d seen in his blue eyes, the soft smile on his lips.

_And it’s a good memory._

He’d abandoned her too. Then he’d brought her back somehow (it had to have been him, no one else would’ve cared enough to even try) and then locked her up in that miserable apartment and left her to rot.

Clarence Masters, her ass. If he was there, the least she was going to do to him was run over his toes.

“… I thought… her number was on Rowena’s phone…”

“Why were you going through Rowena’s phone in the first place?”

“She was… I was…”

Apparently Jack hadn’t thought about making up an excuse for that. Meg figured that was a time as good as any to make her entrance.

She rolled herself to the kitchen’s archway and the conversation died. Castiel, who was leaning against her counter, stood immediately and took a step towards her as if he was thinking about coming closer to her, but one glare on Meg’s part was enough to freeze him in place.

“Well, ain’t this just a charming meeting,” she said, grinning at them and hoping that they’d understand she was two seconds away from ripping all their throats. She looked at Jack, who was intently staring at his shoes and then at Sam. “I thought we were friends, Sammy! But you never came to visit me when I came back from the dead. Honestly, a girl could get offended.”

“I didn’t know you were back,” Sam replied, stepping backwards and raising a finger. “I didn’t know Cas had brought you back.”

“Yes, Clarence,” Meg said, turning her eyes towards him once more. “I need to have a word or two with you about that.”

Castiel had the decency to at least look contrite.

“Meg, you have to understand…”

“What? What do I _have to_ understand…?” Meg started but she interrupted herself. There was an acute, sound coming from somewhere, like a whistle, and growing louder with every passing second. “Do you hear that?”

Sam and Jack stared at her as if she had lost her mind, but Castiel stood up straight, immediately looking once again like a soldier of Heaven as his angel blade slid from his sleeve and into his hand.

Meg knew what that meant even before the window glasses of her living room shattered with a deafening crash.


	7. Chapter 7

Rowena’s scream came first, followed by the loud sound of wood splintering. Meg rolled out of the kitchen to find two angels, both dressed up in business suits, standing in the middle of her apartment. They both wrinkled their noses with disgust upon seeing her.

She recognized the vessel of one of them. It was the conman that she had threatened on the street all those weeks ago. That was how they’d found her.

“I don’t remember inviting you to this party,” she snarled at them.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rowena’s unmoving form. They had thrown her against Meg’s table, so now she laid wrapped in her cape in the middle of Jack’s papers and Meg’s tarot cards.

She hoped she was still breathing. There were a lot of things that Rowena had to clarify for her yet.

“You’re coming with us, abomination,” said the angel that was wearing the conman, as he and his partner raised their blades.

“Or what?” Meg asked, rising her chin, defiantly.

Sam, Castiel and Jack came out after her.

That gave the angel in the conman’s body some pause. They were outnumbered, but they were still more powerful than their opponents. If they could…

“Hamael!” the other angel exclaimed, his eyes growing wider.

“I know, Ithuriel,” Hamael muttered. “It’s Lucifer’s spawn.”

It took Meg a second to realize they were talking about Jack and not her.

So that was confusing.

Castiel stepped forwards and so did Sam, both wielding their own blades.

“You’re not going to hurt any of them, brother,” Castiel threatened.

“We won’t hurt them any more than it’s necessary to take them with us,” Hamael replied. “You and Sam Winchester, however… we’re under orders to kill.”

They lunged forwards, their blades glistening in the air. Hamael and Castiel’s weapons clashed, while the other angel managed to knock Sam to the ground. Without thinking, Meg stretched her hand and pushed one of her lamps forwards, hitting Ithuriel straight in the face. It was only a small distraction, but it was enough for Sam to lift his hand and stab him right through the throat. Ithuriel’s eyes flashed white, and his blade dropped to the ground… Meg stopped it in mid-air with a flicker of her wrist.

Castiel and Hamael were locked in a tight, murderous embrace. They spun around and Meg saw her chance. With a flicker of her wrist, she sent the blade flying across the room. The tip pierced through Hamael’s back and the angel screamed in pain. Castiel moved away to prevent the other angel from knocking him down as it dropped to the ground.

Meg groaned. Those scorched wing marks were going to be a bitch to clean out.

A second later, she realized that she would never have the chance to see that apartment again.

“We have to go!” Sam said. He stood up to help Jack, who was currently trying to incorporate an unconscious Rowena. “It’s not safe here.”

Meg called Ithuriel’s weapon back to her hand and cleaned the blood in her shirt before tucking it inside her boot. She preferred to have it rather than not.

“Last one to the car pays for the drinks,” she joked, as she turned her chair around and lead them out of her apartment.

Castiel and Jack took the stairs, while Sam held Rowena up in his arms as they rode down the elevator in tense silence.

The Impala was parked outside of Meg’s building. She was surprised that car was still running after all those years.

“Marjorie?”

Meg cursed internally and lifted up her head. The nosey old lady from the first floor, who sometimes helped her with the groceries, was looking outside of her window.

“Goodnight, Mrs. Blanchard,” Meg greeted her.

“I heard really loud noises in your apartment!” Mrs. Blanchard screamed. “Is everything okay?”

Meg figured there was no way to hide the fact they were stuffing a tiny, unconscious redheaded woman inside a big black car, so she rolled with that.

“Yes, just my, uh… my aunt had a little too much to drink,” she said, with a nervous laughter. “We’re taking her home.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “Well, you drive safe now.”

“Thank you. Sorry that we woke you, Mrs. Blanchard.”

Castiel picked her up from the chair. Meg let out a yelp of surprise and then let out a chuckle, leaning against him.

“Smile for the old bat,” she instructed.

Castiel looked up and waved his hand at Mrs. Blanchard as he pushed Meg inside of the car next to Jack. Sam folded up her scooter and put it away on the trunk. Meg thought stupidly that she was glad she had chosen the portable model.

None of that was important now. Sam started the car and they were off.

They remained in awkward silence, with Rowena’s head lolling back and forth with the movement of the car. After a while, Meg cleared her throat.

“So… is anybody going to fill me in?”

 

* * *

 

The three hours to Lebanon, where the boys had apparently settled in something called the Men of Letter’s base (Meg thought she was getting that right) were just riddled with very confusing and contradictory stories coming from Sam, Jack and Castiel (and Rowena, when she finally recovered enough from her concussion to wake up and participate in the conversation), but Meg manage to get a pretty accurate picture of what the situation was.

First of all, Rowena was Crowley’s mother. Meg had not expected that, on account on how Rowena was actually likeable unlike her spawn.

Crowley was really dead. So was Lucifer, after he’d somehow managed to escape from the Cage (the details on that one were… fuzzy, since Sam and Castiel refused to elaborate too much) and impregnate a woman. Jack over there? Oh, he might look twenty-something, but he was actually a toddler. No one, not even Jack, could explain his growth spurt fresh out of the womb.

“Wait, so he’s a nephilim,” Meg said, looking at the kid with new eyes. “Is he…?”

“I don’t have any more powers,” Jack said, lowering his eyes. “My father took my grace away.”

Meg imagined that had been before Dean was stupid enough to give himself to Michael in order to kill Lucifer. And that was why he was missing.

Also, Mary was back from the dead too.

“Right. That’s not going to be awkward at all,” Meg commented. “Have you guys forgotten who my father was?”

Sam cringed in the rearview mirror and Castiel shifted on his seat, uncomfortable.

“We could… not mention that to her.”

Sam scoffed, as if he thought it would be impossible to keep that from Mary, and Meg had to agree with him. She also made sure to stare daggers into the back of Castiel’s head until he moved, uncomfortable. She hadn’t forgotten how he had left her behind while he was off doing God knew what with Sam and his… nephew, she supposed.

It was a good thing that Jack had found her when he did, too. Meg wasn’t sure she would have been able to keep it together much longer before boredom drove her to try something very dumb or very dangerous. Probably both.

She saved the question she wanted to ask Castiel and moved on to the next one:

“So what was your theory about what Michael was doing now?” she asked, turning her attention to Jack.

Jack seemed uncomfortable to be put on the spot all of the sudden, but he cleared his throat and straight his shoulders. He had never looked more like a kid trying to act like the adults.

“I think he’s going to try to lay siege to Hell and kill all the demons,” he explained. “That’s what he did in the other world.”

“But Hell has a power vacuum with all the ancient ones gone,” Meg commented. She bit her tongue and swallow the thought that followed that reasoning, ready to jump on to the next one: “And he wants you two dead because you’re probably the only ones who have a snowball’s chance to get him to vacate the premises of his shiny new vessel.”

“Not that we have any idea how to get him to do that,” Castiel admitted with a sigh.

“We’re still working on finding a way to rescue Dean,” Sam added.

He sounded pessimistic and Meg figured he thought they wouldn’t find a way and he was going to lose his brother for good. That wasn’t completely impossible, of course, but she wasn’t the one who was going to say it. She looked outside of the window in silence, counting the road signs that turned into street lamps illuminating a small, silent town they drove through quickly.

Sam took a turned and they descended through a tunnel underneath what seemed to be an abandoned factory. If Meg hadn’t been able to see in the dark, she certainly would have missed out the entry, because it was so well hidden. They parked inside a wide garage, lined up on both sides with very old cars.

Rowena was the first one to get out of the car, still holding her head and groaning softly. Sam came out of the car along with her, but Rowena shook her head when he tried to put a hand on her elbow to help her out.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just need a good night sleep. Now if you excuse me…”

She walked away unsteadily over her vertiginous heels. Sam followed her with his eyes until Meg cleared her throat loudly.

“Oh. Sorry.”

She probably could have taken the scooter out of the trunk using telekinesis, but she wanted to humiliate him a little bit. The same reason why she rejected Castiel’s help to sit in it and why she took off in the same direction Rowena had gone without waiting for any of them to give her permission.

She immediately regretted it a little bit. The place was huge, with intricate hallways and doors lining up t either side. After a while, Meg wasn’t sure anymore which way was the garage she’d just left, which was bad. She would have liked to have a clearer idea of the way out of this bunker. She could hear footsteps behind her and without turning, she knew Castiel was following her.

She didn’t turn to look at him. She needed time to think about everything she was planning on screaming at him, so she stubbornly continued roaming until she ended in what appeared to be a big library, with two or three people around, some of them reading, others eating over the long tables.

They all turned to look at her with a startle.

“Excuse me?” the man closest to her muttered. He spoke with a sort of posh accent and stared at her with an unfriendly frown. “Who might you be?”

“Someone who knows how to mind her own business,” Meg replied, arching an eyebrow at him. “I suspect you know very little about that.”

“Ketch, this is… Marjorie Prince,” Castiel said. “She’s a psychic.”

So they were going with that.

Ketch didn’t seem placated by that explanation. Meg decided she didn’t like him right back.

“Nice to meet you all,” she said, with a sharp smile. “Does anybody happen to know if there’s booze in this place?”

Some of the confused people pointed her to the right, so she turned her scooter that way. At the last second, however, she had to stop it and let out a bitter laugh.

“The bastards who built this didn’t exactly have accessibility in mind, did they?” she commented, staring down at the steps that had made her stop.

“Let me help you…” Castiel said.

“I don’t need you to,” Meg snapped at him.

She hadn’t done this in a while, mainly because she didn’t remember that she could do it. But just like telekinesis, she found it was all muscle memory: she willed herself to move from one place to the other and suddenly she and her scooter were on the kitchen, in front of the cabinets. Meg raided them without a care until she found a bottle of whiskey.

“Dean’s?” she asked, shaking it in Castiel’s direction. Castiel didn’t answer, so Meg figured she was right. “Oh, well. It’s not like he’s gonna be able to enjoy it any time soon.”

She opened it and took a long swig directly from it.

“Meg,” Castiel started, taking a step closer to her. “Can we talk?”

Meg wiped her mouth with her sleeve and looked up at him again.

“Fine, _Castiel_. Let’s talk.”

She spun her scooter around and whipped her hand so a chair from the table would slid right in front of her. Castiel understood what she expected from him and sat down in front of her, his hands over his knees and his back and neck rigid. Meg still found the way her blue eyes pierced through her, but now that she knew – now she remembered – she refused to look away from them.

“Why am I back?” she asked first. “From… wherever it was that I was before.”

“Do you remember anything about it?”

“No.”

That was a lie. She remembered a voice, calling her name in the distance, a strength pulling her away from a dark, quiet place. Now she knew that voice was his, but she wanted him to admit it.

Castiel didn’t disappoint. He sighed and looked at her face.

“I brought you back,” he said. “Rowena and I. We brought you back with a spell.”

“You brought me back _like this_?” Meg gestured towards her legs.

“Some… things might have gone wrong.”

“You don’t say.” Meg rolled her eyes. “See, this is why you don’t mess with that sort of thing, Cas! I didn’t even know demons had an afterlife! I thought we just… disappeared forever.”

“The Empty is not much of an afterlife.”

“It was nicer than my last afterlife, that’s for sure. At the very least no one was poking me with sharp objects,” she quipped and took another shot of whiskey. “Why did you do it?”

That was apparently a more sensitive topic. Castiel shifted in his seat and rubbed the back of his neck.

“I…” he said. He stopped, swallow and began again: “I was hoping you’d help us to rescue Dean. Alistair knew of a spell to expel angel’s from their vessels and since you were his apprentice, I thought that you could have that knowledge as well.”

“Plus I’m prettier looking that Alistair, isn’t that right?”

“You look like a demon,” Castiel declared simply. Meg decided she could get offended for that after he’d explain himself. Castiel lowered his eyes for a moment, as if he needed to think on how to go on after that phrase: “But you were my friend. I cared for you, Meg. And I believed that you cared for me, in the past. That’s why I had to… I had to try.”

He looked up at her, his eyes shining as if he was imploring mercy from her, some sort of understanding. His gaze broke through the wall of Meg’s fury, but she wasn’t ready to let go of it just yet. She stuck her chin up in the air, preparing her next question:

“Then when did you leave me to rot in that ward?”

“I didn’t leave you…”

“No, you felt guilty and went to see me once,” she pointed out wryly. “But if I hadn’t asked you to, you wouldn’t have got me out of there.”

“I thought that was what was best for you. You said it yourself, you didn’t know if you were a good person, if it would be okay for you to remember…”

“Remember Hell?” She let out a bitter laugh. “Remember that I am one of the damned ones and that every other single person I have ever cared for is gone? Yeah, it’s kind of a rough deal.” She made a pause to gulp down half of the bottle. “Still beats being stuck in an apartment in goddamn Wichita day in, day out, not knowing what I was and what the hell I was supposed to do with myself. Do you have any idea what that is like?”

“Yes,” he said, simply. He sighed and straightened his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Meg. I know I said I was going to come visit you, but after the last time we spoke… after…”

He didn’t have to continue. Meg remembered perfectly well the sensation of his lips over hers, his fingertips running through her hair…

Goddammit, she was having a rally hard time staying mad at him. She knocked down the last of the whiskey and huffed.

“I thought it was safest for you,” he whispered.

“Don’t you dare pity me,” she snapped at him. “That is one thing I am not going to allow you to do, Clarence.”

The old familiar nickname rolled off her tongue with ease. Castiel’s lips twitched, as if he was barely holding back a smile.

“I would never dare.”

Smug bastard. It was as if he knew Meg would end up forgiving him, no matter what. In fact, she already had, but he didn’t need to know that.

She settled the empty bottle on the floor and leaned forwards, moving her scooter ever so slightly closer to him, so that their knees would be grazing each other. She leaned forwards to look at him right in the eye.

“You’re not off the hook,” she told him. “You’re going to have to do a lot to make it up to me, do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Good.” She put a hand on the back of his neck and pulled him closer. “Then let’s get started.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Marjorie” was assigned a room at the end of one of those labyrinthine hallways. Sam apologized for not having a bigger one for her.

“The place is a little crowded these days.”

“Who are all these people anyway? I thought all your friends were dead.”

“They are… refuges, of sorts.”

“Right.” Meg decided she’d tried to make sense of that later. “Well, then, see you tomorrow, Sam.”

She crossed the doorway, followed closely by Castiel. Sam remained outside for a moment, as if he was waiting for Castiel to help accommodate Meg and then leave with him. After a few seconds of no one moving, Castiel took a step towards him.

“Goodnight, Sam,” he said, as he ostensibly reached for the handle.

“Oh.” Sam’s eyes grew wider with sudden understanding. “Oh! Uh… g-goodnight…”

Castiel closed the door and Meg snickered.

“And here I thought he was the brains of the operation,” she commented.

Castiel responded nothing to it. Instead, he leaned over, passed a hand behind her knees and the other around her shoulders, lifting her from her chair as if she weighted nothing more than a feather.

“What is this?” She laughed, but she threw her arms around his neck anyway. “I’m not a blushing bride, Clarence.”

Castiel ignored her and gently carried her to the bed. He sat her down there and knelt in front of her, his blue eyes startlingly bright. His hand came to rest on her thigh as he looked up.

“Are you… are you sure you want to…?”

“Do you remember what I told you the last time we were together?” Meg ran her fingers through his hair. She wanted to yank him and kiss him once more, but she needed to clear this up first.

“I remember.”

“You never answered to me. What were you going to say?”

The smile in his lips was softer than ever.

“Do you really have to ask?”

“I wouldn’t mind hearing it.”

Castiel propped himself up on the bed, his face closer than ever to hers.

“I was going to say… yes. Yes, I did want to… move furniture with you.” He chuckled softly. “I still do.”

Meg closed the distance between the two to kiss him softly.

“Well, isn’t it nice when dreams come true?”

 

* * *

 

The bed was almost too small for the two of them, which Castiel thought it was appropriate to solve by snuggling as close as he could to Meg, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her to her chest. If it had been any other person, she would’ve already kicked them out of the room.

Not him, though. Never him.

The bunker was silent in the dead of night, which was all the better. Nobody would have to hear it when they went for round three and maybe even round four. She was going to get to that soon. At any moment. For now, she just… wanted to rest her eyes a little bit.

Castiel’s fingers carding through her hair sent a shiver down her spine.

“This is how it was supposed to be,” he muttered. He sounded slightly amazed. “This is how it was supposed to feel.”

“You getting all poetic on me, Clarence?”

“I’m sorry. I know you don’t like that.”

Meg sighed and rolled over herself. He had a droopy, happy smile on his face as he moved his fingers from the top of her head, to the side of her face and down her neck. Meg watched him in silence.

“Well, I’m not a blushing bride, but neither were you,” she commented.

Castiel lowered his eyes. He seemed ashamed, for some reason.

“You were dead,” he said. “I was vulnerable. She… she wasn’t she seemed…”

“I don’t care,” Meg interrupted him. “I don’t want to talk about the past. Not when there are so many interesting things about the present that we could be talking about.”

She slid her hand underneath the covers to caress his chest. Castiel sighed and his eyes fluttered close and for a moment, Meg delighted in the sight. It was so nice to have this power, this… effect on him.

“Like, what are we going to do about Hell?”

The question clearly caught him off guard. He frowned and stared at her, confused.

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Meg replied. “What are we going to do about Hell? They have no leaders, they’re under attack…”

“Meg, they are…”

Meg took his hands away from him and propped herself up on her elbow.

“They are what?” she asked, almost daring him to say the word.

Castiel was wise enough to realize that the honeymoon would be over in a heartbeat if he did.

“They’re not our allies,” he concluded instead. “We have bigger problems.”

“Yes, of course. Dumb and Dumber are always the bigger problem.” She rolled her eyes. “You might not care, Cas, and believe me, I know my kind hasn’t exactly given you any reasons to. But Hell was my home. It might have been a shitty, torturous home, but it was all ever I knew.”

“That’s not true,” he argued. “You were human once.”

“Even so, that was too long ago to even matter. And I don’t remember any of it.”

He said nothing. Only watched her in silence until Meg inched as far from him as the bed allowed her to.

“So what’s the big idea? You’re going to let Michael kill all demons? Because you know he’s not gonna make an exception for little old me just because you happened to like me.”

“He’s not going to make an exception for anybody,” Castiel pointed out, with his usual bluntness. “You heard Hamael.”

“Yes, I did. All the more reason for you to start looking into the possibility of making new, unlikely allies.”

Castiel sighed. He seemed to be starting to resign to the fact that she was just not going to let it go.

“What do you suggest we do?” he asked her, finally.

Meg licked her lips.

“Hell has no King. We have Lucifer’s son…”

“Absolutely no.”

“Cas, you didn’t even hear what I was going to say!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Castiel cut her off. The intensity of the anger in his voice startled her somewhat. “Jack doesn’t have his powers anymore, and even if he did, I would not allow it for him to be used in such a way.”

Meg lowered her eyes, admitting defeat.

It didn’t matter anyway. She’d always suspected that Castiel was going to say no to that particular plan of hers. She’d only suggested it to make the next one more… palatable to him.

“Well… I could always do it.”

“Do what?”

“Take over,” Meg explained, with a shrug, almost as if she was resigned that would be her fate. “Organize the demons. Get them to put up a fight against Michael, at the very least help them to last long enough for you and Sam to come up with a way to rescue Dean.”

She didn’t say “kill Michael”, because she knew Castiel would never accept that. And even if he did, Sam wouldn’t. She didn’t have any particular attachment to Dean, though, so if push came to shove…

Sam would never forgive her. Castiel might, over time, but Meg wasn’t too hopeful. She was probably the only person in that entire bunker with the guts to do what had to be done, and even if she did, everyone would hate her for it. But if she had to sacrifice Dean for her species to survive… hell, for _everybody_ to survive, then she would. She was willing to sacrifice a lot more.

She didn’t tell that to Castiel, but she was prepared for the possibility that he would guess exactly what was on her mind.

He slowly sat up and rubbed his temples, as if that entire conversation had given him a headache.

“I… I really don’t know, Meg,” he sighed. “Do you think they will accept you as their Queen?”

“I don’t see why they wouldn’t,” Meg replied. “Whoever is leading them now, if there’s someone at all, probably isn’t as ancient and powerful as me. I was Azazel’s daughter, Lucifer’s right hand, Crowley’s pain in the ass. I could work with them… or organize a hostile takeover. Whichever works best.”

Castiel made a sound. She wasn’t sure if it was a scoff or a chuckle or something in between, but his skepticism was palpable.

“You don’t think I could?”

“No, I’m sure you could,” he clarified, looking at her over his shoulder. “That’s exactly what worries me. If you did that, you’d become a prime target for Michael.”

“Well, then, it’s a good thing that you and Sam will have come up with a solution to that issue by then.”

“Meg…”

“You were right, by the way,” she interrupted him. “I do know the angel exorcism you spoke about.”

He blinked at her, baffled.

“Why didn’t you say so before?”

“I had other things I wanted to do.” Meg sat up and shamelessly slid a finger down his bicep. “And besides, I don’t know if it’ll work. Michael is an archangel. He’s in a whole other level.”

“We have Rowena,” Castiel replied. “She’s resourceful and extremely powerful. I have seen her rework spells, do things that were supposedly impossible…”

Meg nodded pensively, but she wasn’t as optimistic as Castiel.

“I guess it’s worth a shot,” she said, without compromising. She looked up at him again: “But…”

Castiel put a hand on her cheek and kissed her.

“I’ll do my best to keep you safe,” he promised. “Anything I have to do. So please, Meg, let’s not speak about your plans for Hell for the time being.”

It sounded like he was tired of even thinking about it. Meg was reluctant, but she decided to drop the issue. She had already planted the idea on Castiel’s mind after all.

“Very well,” she agreed. “After all, there are much more interesting things for us to be doing right now.”

And with that, she pulled him back down to the sheets with him.

 

* * *

 

It was pretty difficult to keep anything secret in that bunker, Meg discovered. After a few day, every one gave them sideway glances whenever she rolled around with Castiel walking briskly with her, but no one seemed too eager to comment on it.

Except for Ketch, of course.

“Is this… a good idea?”

Sam, as always, was obsessed with trying to rescue Dean, so if a minor case arose (a vampire, a werewolf, a serial killing witch) either Mary, Bobby or one of the other refuges were sent to deal with that.

The rest of them (Rowena, Ketch, Castiel and now Meg too) were put to the task of trying to come up with a way to rescue Dean or, barring that, to defeat Michael. Jack helped out too, but since he had no powers, his contribution mainly consisted on bringing everyone coffee and snacks and sit around to have an intense crash course in Latin.

That night in particular, they were working on the angel exorcism’s kinks, trying to see what they could do to make it powerful enough to work on an archangel.

“It’s the only idea we have so far that doesn’t involve stabbing my brother,” Sam answered, calmly.

“I don’t mean that,” Ketch explained, turning his head slightly towards Meg and Castiel, who were sitting side by side in front of a large tome of Latin phrases. “I meant… you two. I mean the fact that you two have… an intimate relationship.”

Jack choked on the coffee he was drinking and Rowena stopped filing her nails. She only looked mildly surprised, as if she’d suspected something buy only now had concrete confirmation.

Meg stared daggers at Ketch’s face, but she smiled wide.

“Why, Ketch, thank you for your concern. But I don’t see how that is any of your business.”

“It could be everyone’s business,” Ketch said. “Angel and human’s unions are known to always be fertile, and we’ve had enough trouble with one nephilim. No offense, Jack.”

“Uh… none taken?” Jack said, as if he wasn’t sure if he should be offended or not.

Rowena snickered and Sam bit the inside of his cheek. Everyone except Ketch knew the truth about Meg, of course, because according to Sam, he wouldn’t exactly be down with using information provided by a demon and they needed him on the team for… something. Meg had honestly stopped paying attention by that point of Sam’s explanation.

It was kind of funny that he was worried about that possibility, though. Demons rendered their female meatsuits barren by virtue of stopping all the biological functions necessary for them to get impregnated. They could be resumed at will, of course, like if they were trying to produce a cambion, but Meg had only ever met one demon that’d gone through that hassle. Her own meatsuit, in particular, had been rebuilt by Rowena’s spell and imperfectly so, so Meg was certain that even if super fertile angel juice was involved, nothing would come of it.

Castiel obviously thought the same thing.

“We’re being careful,” he lied to calm Ketch’s fears.

“Even so…”

“How about we worry about where _our_ bits go and you worry about yours?” Meg said.

“But…” Ketch tried protesting.

“Arthur, drop it,” Rowena said, rolling her eyes. “Aren’t there more pressing issues we should be worried about at this moment?”

Meg threw a thankful smile towards Rowena. Despite the lies and the secrecy (and her being the mother of her murderer), she was finding out she had a soft spot for the witch.

Ketch obviously wasn’t happy with the answer, but in his favor, he did end the conversation there.

Castiel didn’t drop it as easily later, when they were laying together in each other’s arms in Meg’s room.

“Perhaps we should take some sort of… precaution.”

Meg had to laugh at that.

“Cas, come on,” she said, turning over to look at him. “Even if it was necessary, don’t you think it’d be too little, too late at this point?”

Castiel nodded in agreement. After all, they had been spending every night together in the few weeks since she’d come to the bunker, making love with a sort quiet, but pressing despair. Life-affirming sex, Meg called it. “Glad you’re not dead anymore” sex, even. But there was an undercurrent to it that none of them dare to speak out loud. It was almost as if they’d suspected that whatever little time they had together was precious, that it’d run out soon enough.

Rowena was almost completely certain that by adding certain lines to the exorcism, it should work on an archangel. She had complained about not having a test subject, but admitting begrudgingly that the only way they’d have to know for sure was if they manage to test it out on Michael himself. Even if they did manage to capture an angel to test it, they’d still wouldn’t be sure about its effectiveness until they’d try it out in their very specific target.

“Good enough for me,” Sam declared one day. “Now we need to find where they are going to strike next.”

That was easier said than done. Reports of angelic and demonic activity had decreased greatly in the last few days. It was almost as if both Heaven and Hell had retreated, and they were in a tense truce waiting for… something. Meg believed they themselves didn’t know what.

“Charlene has compiled a list of the latest activities,” Ketch said, typing quickly in his computer. “It’s… very sparse. Not enough for us to make out a pattern, but…”

“Can I make a suggestion?” Meg interrupted him.

Ketch narrowed his eyes at her. Ever since the awkward birds and bees conversation they’d had, he obviously had decided he didn’t like Meg. Sam, however, nodded at her, urging her to go on.

“You’re not going to track Michael down by patterns. He’s obviously up to something and he won’t be interrupted,” she said. “The easiest way for you to set a trap for him would be to… lure him out.”

“And how, pray tell, do you suggest that we do that?” Ketch asked, throwing his hands in the air as if what Meg was saying was completely ludicrous. Meg shot a venomous grin at him and said simply:

“Bait.” She jerked her head towards Jack.

It was as if she’d slapped every single person in the room. They all recoiled and stared at her as if she’d recommended boiling a baby alive. Which, all things considered, wasn’t that far from the truth.

“Absolutely not!” Sam said immediately. So apparently there was something he wasn’t willing to do to get his brother back after all. Who would’ve thought?

“Meg, you can’t possibly be suggesting…” Castiel started protesting.

“Why not? Kid’s been training to defend himself,” she pointed out. “Michael wants his head in a plate. He’s not gonna resist the temptation to try and get it.”

“Even so…”

“I’ll do it,” Jack interrupted. Now it was his turn to be stared at in horror. He didn’t care. He lifted up his chin with pride and repeated: “I’ll do it. I’ll be the bait.”

“No, Jack,” Castiel said.

“I’m not asking your permission, Castiel. I’m telling you I’m going to do it,” Jack insisted. “If it’s the only way to get Michael out, I’m willing to do it.”

“Jack, it’s too dangerous…”

“I am aware,” Jack said. “But does anyone have a better suggestion?”

The kid didn’t often remind Meg of his father. But the way he shut everyone who dared to question his decision with that simple question would have made Lucifer proud, for sure.

Castiel was in a foul mood when they went to what had become their bedroom by this point.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked him, when Castiel didn’t even offer to help her get out of the chair like he did every other night. “Come on, Cas. The kid volunteered…”

“Because you planted the idea in his head!” Castiel snapped. “He wouldn’t have, otherwise. And he is just a child. I’m not happy with putting him in danger.”

Meg just looked at him tiredly. In any other occasion, she would have responded with a witty, wry comeback. She would have fought with him just for the fun of it, for the angry sex and the reconciliation afterwards. But that particular day, she just… couldn’t muster the energy to do so. Perhaps dying and coming back to life had softened her.

Or perhaps it was that she felt weirdly exhausted those days.

In any case, as Castiel paced around the room looking like a lion in a cage, Meg decided she didn’t want to fight with him that particular night.

“You will _all_ be in danger,” she said instead. “You could _all_ die. So if you want to be mad at me, fine. But I’m not gonna spend what might be our last night together being petty and angry.”

Castiel stopped in his tracks at those words and sighed. He rubbed his temples and turned towards her. She’d never seen him so tired.

“I… you’re right,” he admitted with a sigh. “Of course you’re right. I just don’t… I don’t like any of this.”

He sat down on the bed and looked up at her. The crinkles around his eyes were deeper and Meg realized, with a pang in her chest, that he was older. Not just in the sense that he was old as dirt, as most angels were, but that his time on earth and everything he had gone through, all the deaths and injuries and madness, had aged both him and his vessel out.

It was a strange thing. They were supposed to be ageless, they were supposed to be more than their physical forms. And yet he was old and she was tired. They were going to start bickering like an old married couple at any second.

“Well, think about it this way: something worse might be coming around the corner. Then you’re going to miss the days when we were hunting Michael.”

That made him chuckle. He leaned forwards and grabbed her hand. It was such a gentle, small gesture that it startled her.

“Maybe there is something worse around the corner,” he said. “But I don’t think I want to be here to deal with that too.”

Meg blinked, trying to understand what he was implying. No, she’d understood it quite well. She just… couldn’t quite believe he was talking like that.

“Once we’ve got Dean back, we could go away, you and me,” Castiel continued. “Stop fighting battles that aren’t ours.”

“You can’t be serious,” she said. Her voice came out a little high pitched due to her incredulity. “You want to _retire_?”

Castiel shrugged and Meg laughed. She laughed not because the idea wasn’t a little bit tempting, but because it was ridiculous.

“May I remind you I tried living a normal, quiet life and it almost drove me insane?” she pointed out.

“It would be different,” he said. “We’d have each other. We could take Jack with us, if we can tempt him away from the prospect of being a hunter. I don’t think we’d ever be bored if we’re together, Meg.”

Meg moved her hand away from him.

“Careful now, angel,” she warned him, in a whisper. “You keep talking like that, I’m gonna start thinking you’re about to get down on one knee and give me a ring.”

The smile on Castiel’s lips was soft, but it did nothing to calm Meg’s restlessness.

“Our lives are potentially endless, Meg. I don’t know if marriage would have any significance under those circumstances.”

Meg looked away. She needed a moment to gather herself together. A moment to tell herself that he was right and it didn’t really matter. A moment to convince herself that the knot in her stomach wasn’t disappointment of any kind.

“Or, again, you could die this weekend,” she pointed out. “So how about we stop talking about ‘what ifs’ and we do something… more hands on.”

She put a hand on his knee and squeeze. Castiel was smiling as he leaned over to kiss her again.


	9. Chapter 9

Jack, Sam, Ketch, Rowena and Castiel were going on the trip to hunt Michael. Mary and Bobby would meet them at the spot and they could start preparing the trap for Michael.

Meg didn’t like the idea of being left behind, but she recognized the truth in Castiel’s arguments for doing so.

“It’s not that I think that you can’t be useful in a fight. I know you can defend yourself. But even so, if the angels were to see you, they’d go after you first. We’ve already have so much going on…”

“I’d be a distraction to you,” she cut him off. “You’d be too worried about me to actually focus on what you have to do.”

She didn’t know whether to be offended or flattered by that position. In any case, there was no arguing with Castiel over this issue. She sat in the garage and watched as they parked their weapons and everything else they needed. Some of the refuges had decided to also form part of the expedition, so the bunker was going to be nearly deserted.

It was going to be a long, long couple of days without them there. Without _him_ there.

Castiel walked away from the others and leaned over her chair to whisper at her.

“Don’t worry. It will all be over soon.”

“I’m not worried,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “I got my magazines, I got a lot to catch up on Netflix. I’m not even gonna notice that you’re gone.”

That was a lie and they both knew it. Castiel smiled and kissed her on the forehead briefly before moving down to her mouth. The kiss he gave her was deep, reassuring. As if he wanted to swear to her again that everything would be fine.

Meg really was hoping she wouldn’t have to say something stupid when he broke away, but she felt compelled to do so:

“Come back to me, Clarence.”

“I will,” he promised. He left a soft peck on the side of her lips and straightened up to go to the Impala.

He didn’t look back.

Meg sighed as Rowena walked past her chair too.

“Take care of yourself, auntie,” Meg told her. “This place would be a total bummer if you died.”

“Oh, don’t feel too worried about me, dearie. And how about you buy us a good cabernet sauvignon to celebrate when I come back, eh?”

“It’s a date,” Meg answered with a playful smile.

She stayed on the garage still and watch as they drove away towards certain danger.

Meg was a demon. She never regretted anything. It simply wasn’t in her nature to do so. But as she watched the Impala disappear through the gates, something ate at her stomach, something annoying that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

As if the last words she’d said to Castiel hadn’t been exactly the right ones.

 

* * *

 

The hours dragged endlessly. Despite what she’d told Castiel, she couldn’t just keep her mind occupied with small, stupid distractions. Every time she tried, her mind crept back to the empty side of the bed and to the fact that Castiel wasn’t there with her, cuddling her and running stupid commentary about the series they were supposed to be watching in silence.

Meg supposed she could get on her chair and get out of the room to talk with the three or four hunters that were still in the bunker, maybe even make an attempt to learn their names as she looked for something to munch on. But just the very thought was exhausting to her. Everything was exhausting to her those days, to the point that if she was still under the delusion of being somewhat human, she would’ve blamed it on a flu or something equally inane. As it was, she couldn’t explain it.

Perhaps it was the fact that they’d been working on the angel exorcism for so long and now that they were about to reap the fruits of their labors, the effects from all that effort was crashing down on her. Maybe it was a good thing that they’d left her behind after all.

After a few hours, Meg resignedly put her computer away. Her eyelids were fluttering shut at every moment and her head felt terribly heavy. Despite not understanding where her weariness came from, she didn’t want to keep fighting against it. She’d feel better after her nap, she told herself as she settled down against the pillow and closed her eyes. It was so weird. She had been so concerned with the fact she couldn’t sleep when she still believed herself to be human and now…

She felt into what at first was a soft, even comfortable darkness. Just an infinite nothingness that allowed her to forget about everything: Hell and its tortures, the grief for the people she’d cared about and lost, the fear for the ones she might still lose. All of it disappeared and she just floated into that darkness, only semi-aware that she was asleep.

It was nice, actually. Relaxing. She opened her arms and sank…

_What have you done?_

The voice that came towards her sounded irritated, almost angry, as if Meg had somehow disappointed whoever it was that it was speaking.

 _What have you done?_ , it asked again, angrily.

It irritated her. She had been so calmed until this idiot voice came to interrupt her and just…

 _I did whatever the hell I wanted to_ , she replied in her mind with pride. _Because who was going to stop me?_

The voice in the darkness laughed, a cruel, high-pitched, almost hysterical sound.

_Oh, Hell’s daughter. You don’t know what your impossible child will wreak unto the world._

A pain like nothing Meg had experienced before shot through her body. Meg screamed and put her hands on her swollen belly, as images of blood and chaos invaded the previously peaceful darkness. She was being chased by grubby hands that would take away what was hers, and she was not going to allow it. Her legs still weren’t responding, so she crawled and dragged herself to a corner underneath the trees, ignoring the pain that course through every inch of her.

She had known pain. She could handle pain. What she didn’t know, what she couldn’t understand, was this fiery, protective fire burning inside of her, in her chest, in her very soul. It was her, her treasure, and no one else could have it.

The pain stopped. Breathing in heavily, Meg sat up, looking around. She was in a wood of sorts, with tall, luscious trees all around her and rays of sun simmering through the branches.

There was a small girl in a simple black dress standing in front of her, watching her silently.

Castiel’s old eyes in a new face. Her own smirk reflected back at her, like looking in a small mirror.

Meg woke up with a startled and she almost rolled out of the bed. Her hands were clasped unto the sheets and her skin was clammy with sweat. An acre taste climbed to the back of her throat.

She forced herself to breath and to move very slowly as she climbed on her scooter. The last thing she needed right now was to make a brusque movement and collapse right there in her room again. She couldn’t allow that.

She managed to keep it together all the way to the bathroom. Once there, the nausea overcame her and she lost all composure. She practically fell down off her scooter and she had to drag herself, just like she had done in her dream.

Her stomach was empty. There was nothing for her to vomit except bitter, thick bile that slid down her chin and mixed with the waters below her. Meg’s knuckles were white as she clung unto the sides and tried to maintain a somehow more dignified position over the toilet as she violently expelled that strong, horrible liquid.

The bathroom door swung open.

“Oh! Sorry!” a female voice said.

Meg had the impulse to yell at whoever it was to go fuck themselves, but she couldn’t between the constant heaves climbing up her throat. She was so busy vomiting, she almost didn’t realize when the other person walked inside and gently pulled her hair back.

“There you go, it’s okay,” the girl said, as she rubbed Meg’s back. “Just let it all out, and you’ll feel better soon.”

Meg concentrated on doing just that.

After a few minutes, the nausea and the vomiting finally stopped. The girl passed an arm around Meg and helped her get back in the chair. Meg waited for a few seconds until the bathroom around her stopped spinning before trying to pay attention to what the girl was telling her.

“… must have gone bad,” she said. “At least two others are also in bed with food poisoning.”

Meg supposed this girl wasn’t aware of the fact that she hadn’t eaten with them and therefore, she couldn’t have possibly be suffering from the same thing. The girl turned around and filled a glass with water from the sink.

“Here, drink this,” she said, offering it to Meg. “You’ll feel better once you’ve hydrated a little.”

Meg’s throat felt raw, so she just wetted her lips with the water instead of swallowing her. She wiped her brow with her shirt’s jacket and looked up at the girl that had helped her so kindly.

“What’s your name?” she croaked.

“Maggie,” the girl said and then laughed as if something hilarious had just occurred to her. “That’s funny. Meg, Maggie. But I don’t think we’ve even talked before.”

Meg didn’t know what the fact that their names were similar had to do with anything else the girl had said. So instead, she drunk the water and tried not to think about the images of her dream that still flashed in front of her eyes.

The little girl with Castiel’s eyes…

It couldn’t be true. Dreams were nonsense. That was all they ever were.

But just in case. She needed to be sure.

“Maggie, could you drive me to town? There’s some things I need to get.”

There was no hiding the fact that she’d brought a pregnancy test. Maggie’s eyes opened wide when she saw it, but she said nothing. Everyone knew that Meg was sleeping with Castiel and she imagined everyone in the bunker shared the same concerns about a possible other nephilim. So Meg couldn’t exactly get rid of her as she paid for the test, and then at the bunker as she waited for the results.

“Do you need anything?” Maggie kept asking, knocking on the door while Meg rubbed at her temples with impatience. “A towel? More water?”

“I need you to be quiet, please,” Meg replied.

Maggie managed to do that for exactly five seconds.

“Listen, I know that Ketch has been saying that it can’t possibly be a good thing that another nephilim is born. But I think… if it’s anything like Jack…”

Meg sighed as she watched closely for the little strips to appear. After a few seconds, she sighed and opened the door. Not because she was ready to confront the results, but just because she needed Maggie to stop babbling.

“It’s negative,” she told her. “It was a false alarm. So no one has anything to worry about. We won’t be having another Jack around.”

“Oh.” Maggie looked awkwardly at her shoes for a few seconds. “Well, I’m… I’m sorry to hear that…”

“Don’t be. Maybe Ketch is right and it’s better this way.”

Maggie nodded and then, mercifully, she walked away, leaving Meg alone.

Just in time for her to miss out the positive sign appeared in the result window.

 

* * *

 

It was getting late.

Sam’s entire plan included a time window of twelve hours for them to start worrying. That window had closed two hours ago and they still hadn’t called or given any signs of the results of the battle, whether it had been good or bad. If Meg could pace, she would have already made a hole on the floor already. Instead, all she could do was sit in the garage, fidgeting with her phone and wondering…

In the end, her anxiety won her over.

Jack was the one to pick up, which didn’t help any of Meg’s fears.

“Hello?”

“Where are you? What happened?” Meg almost shouted. “Why are you answering Castiel’s phone?”

“He’s driving,” Jack said and Meg like her stomach, which had been tied in a tight knot since they’d left, finally uncurled slightly. “I’m sorry. We had to stop at the hospital. We had a lot of injuries. Sam has a concussion and Ketch died.”

“He… died?”

“Yes, but Rowena says he’ll be fine in a couple of days,” Jack explained, calmly. “We… Meg, are you okay?”

“Just… just get here,” she said, trying to contain her tears. She didn’t want to break down on the kid, of all people.

“Wait. Castiel wants to talk to you.”

“Meg?”

Meg sighed. For the first time, she admitted to herself that she had been terrified that she wouldn’t hear him calling her name ever again.

“Hey, Clarence,” she muttered. “So, the hunting trip didn’t turn out so great, huh?”

“No,” Castiel admitted after a pause. “I’m sorry. We just couldn’t…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Meg interrupted him. “Just get your ass here, okay? Just… come back and you can tell me all about it in person.”

It had been a disaster.

At first, it seemed like it was going to turn out okay. They’d trapped Michael in a circle of fire and they recited the exorcism to him. First the original, that had only tickled him, then Rowena’s remix of it. That had apparently worked better, but at the last second, Michael had managed to retain control of his vessel and escape the trap. That had been when everything had gone south.

Castiel explained all of this to Meg while they laid down a barely conscious Sam on the bed, while Rowena (whose face was bruised and hair was tangled) ragged a chair and refused to leave the side of the younger Winchester.

If Meg had known her a little better, she’d have say that Rowena felt guilty and wanted to make sure that Sam was okay. Either way, she had her own problems to deal with.

Castiel stared at her stunned when she told him.

“How… how…?” he mumbled when he recovered the capacity to speak: “That’s impossible, Meg!”

 _Your impossible child_. Meg shook her head. Prophetic dreams were bullshit. This has been her subconscious warning her of what her body already knew, nothing more.

“Is it?” Meg laughed. “We also thought stopping the Apocalypse was impossible. We also thought that demons coming back to life was impossible. I’d say we left impossible behind us years ago.”

Castiel walked around the room, with a hand over his mouth. Meg couldn’t tell if he was happy or simply stunned. She’d had a day to get used to the idea and to think about her next move, so she had an answer ready when Castiel inevitably asked:

“What are we going to do?”

“No one can know, Cas,” Meg told him.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what do you think Michael is going to do if he finds out? Throw us a baby shower? My guess is hunters aren’t going to react much better either.” She rolled her eyes. “No, we can’t tell anyone. Not to Rowena, not to Sam, and especially not to Ketch. I’d hate having to hear him say he told me so.”

Castiel didn’t laugh at her joke. He sat on the bed and looked up at her, a pained expression in his eyes.

“We’ll go away,” he said. “We’ll hide somewhere. We’ll…”

“We can’t leave together,” Meg cut him off. “It’ll be too suspicious. And besides, Sam still needs you to get rid of Michael.”

Her angel let out a strangled noise. He understood everything Meg was telling him.

That didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Meg, no.”

“You’ve failed the offensive, Castiel,” she declared. “That means now we gotta go on the defensive. We have to rally Hell and make sure it holds until you can think of something to lock Michael away or send him back to his Apocalypse world or… something. I know you’ll come up with it.”

“Please, no.” Castiel stretched his hands to grab hers and held them tightly against his chest. “Meg, I’m begging you. Don’t do this.”

“It has to be done.”

“You’ll be in danger!”

“I’ll be in danger either way,” she pointed out. “But at least this way, this… thing inside me will be safe, too. I’ll tell the other demons I’m breeding a Cambion, a weapon to fight against Heaven. No one will question who the father is if I do. No one will dare try to hurt it.”

Castiel took in a deep, shuddering breath. He placed Meg’s knuckles against his lips. His kiss was feverishly hot.

“Please, don’t leave me,” he begged. His voice broke slightly. “I _just_ found you again, Meg.”

For the first time since she’d made her choice, since she’d gone over the details of her plan over and over, obsessively, convincing herself it was the only way, Meg felt her resolution wavered a little. She put a hand on Castiel’s chin and lifted his head for him to look at her in the eye.

“I’m not leaving you,” she promised. “Okay? Not forever. We’re making a strategic move to protect ourselves. So we can win. So we can be together in the long run.” She grabbed his hand and lowered it to place it over her stomach. “The three of us.”

It was cheap. It was blatant emotional blackmail.

It worked.

Castiel pulled her chair closer to him and delicately, as if she could break if he made any brusque movements, he surrounded her with his arms and kissed her, slow and deep.

“At least stay tonight?” he begged her.

And Meg couldn’t find it in herself to say no.

 

* * *

 

She was no stranger to heartbreak. She was no stranger to pain and dread and uncertainty and all those unpleasant emotions that came with making a difficult decision. She was no stranger to having to walk away from something she wanted more than any other thing in her life.

She still felt like something had been ripped from her that night as she rolled away from the bunker’s door. The sensation of Castiel’s eyes fixed on the back of her head made her want to turn around, go back to him as fast as she could, let him scoop her up in his arms and kiss her and make her forget about everything and everyone in the world that could hurt them.

But she didn’t turn back.

She kept going until she found a sufficiently desolated crossroads.

Burying the little box and coming back to sit on her scooter was complicated, but she had enough time to adopt a dignified position before the other demon appeared.

Mainly because it took an eternity to show up. Crowley might have been a megalomaniac bastard, but at least he knew it wasn’t a good idea to keep potential clients waiting.

“Yes?” a female voice called finally.

Meg turned to look at her, with critical eye. The crossroads demon was possessing a young, attractive blonde girl, as it was par of the course, complete with a little black dress. She looked a little disappointed to see that it was Meg that had summoned her.

“I’m sorry, I’m confused,” she said with a slightly British accent. “I don’t believe you have a soul to sell?”

“No,” Meg said, leaning over her scooter’s handle. “I just want a bit of information, if you don’t mind giving it to me.”

“Is that so? And what am I gonna get in exchange?”

Meg took out Castiel’s angel blade from inside her jacket's sleeve and casually started cleaning her nails with the tip.

“Not getting stabbed, for starters.”

The crossroads demon accepted that was a fair deal.

“What’s going on in Hell?” Meg asked.

“What isn’t?” the other demon laughed. “Everyone’s tearing each other’s throats. Some are saying that we should get out here, fight the angels. Most are for hiding away and barricading the doors, wait for it all to blow over and hope we don’t get too much debris on our hair.”

“Not you, though."

“I have a job to do.” The crossroads demons shrugged.

She was young. Maybe a Hell’s millennia, give or take a few centuries. She must have accepted to get down from the rack pretty soon.

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Well, pick one,” Meg ordered her. “I need something to call you.”

The crossroads demon frowned at her with suspicion, but she still said what was probably the first name that came to her mind:

“Talbot.”

“Well, Talbot, you’ve shown more guts that all the other demons cowering in the Pit. You’re my second in command now. Congratulations on the promotion.”

Talbot chuckled, as if she thought Meg was joking. When it became clear that she wasn’t, the smile vanished from her face.

“And who are you, exactly?”

“Oh, sweetie.” Meg grinned, letting her eyes go black as a starless night. “I'm your new Queen.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you liked this fic, you can vote for me to write a sequel [here](https://goo.gl/forms/pNPHuaON2bpqfxBC3) until December 15th 2018!


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